Imaginary Lines: Border Enforcement and the Origins of Undocumented Immigration, 1882-1930

Imaginary Lines

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Border Enforcement

Imaginary Lines

and the Origins of Undocumented Immigration, 1882–1930

Patrick Ettinger

University of Texas Press Austin

Copyright © 2009 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2009 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html ♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Some material in this book first appeared as “‘We sometimes wonder what they will spring on us next’: Undocumented Immigrants and Border Enforcement in the American West,” Western Historical Quarterly 37 (Summer 2006): 159–181. Copyright by the Western History Association. Reprinted by permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ettinger, Patrick W. Imaginary lines : border enforcement and the origins of undocumented immigration, 1882–1930 / Patrick Ettinger. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-292-72118-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. United States—Emigration and immigration—History—19th century.  2. United States—Emigration and immigration—Government policy.  3. Mexico—Emigration and immigration—History—19th century.  4. Mexican-American Border Region—Emigration and immigration—History—19th century.  5. Illegal aliens—United States—History—19th century.  6. Illegal aliens—Government policy—United States.  I. Title. JV6453.E88  2009 325.7309'041—dc22 2009013817

For Laura, Cate, and Connor

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”

It is one thing to draw an arbitrary geographical line between two spheres of sovereignty; it is another to persuade people to respect it. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix



Introduction

1



Chapter 1

13

Chapter 2

37

Chapter 3

67

Chapter 4

93

Chapter 5

123

Chapter 6

145

Epilogue An Imaginary Line: Change and Continuity on the U.S.-Mexico Border

167

The Menaces Without: Immigrant Aliens and the Origins of Immigration Restrictions

Diverted Streams: Discovering a Permeable Border, 1882–1891

Drawing the Lines: Blueprints for Immigration Enforcement on the Borders, 1891–1910

Erasing the Lines: Immigrant Ingenuity on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1895–1910

Northward Bound: Mexican Immigrants, Migrants, and Refugees at the Border, 1900–1921

The Sisyphean Task: Origins of the Modern Border

Notes

179

Bibliography

225



239



Index

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Acknowledgments

I want to thank the host of individuals who supported me, in various ways, through the long process of working on this book. To my friend and adviser, Dave Thelen, I owe a truly incalculable debt. I learned more from him than I may ever even realize, and I benefited richly from his constant intellectual prodding and the warm graciousness of his friendship. Other members of my dissertation committee at Indiana University—John Bodnar, Henry Glassie, and Peter Guardino—made themselves available for comment and consultation, and each provided excellent advice and criticism of the final draft. A host of friends and colleagues in Bloomington made the process of pursuing my doctoral degree both stimulating and enjoyable: Chad and Lisa Berry, Alex and Martha Urbiel, Andy and Shanna Draheim, Richard and Lee Pierce, Iain Anderson, Mary Caroline Simpson, Susan Armeny, Debbie Gershenowitz, Paul Murphy, Carol Engelhardt, Lisa Boehm, David Spaeder, Willard Sunderland, Betsy Lenhart, and Julie Plaut. Added to those are the friends who also read all or parts of the dissertation. At different stages of the process, I benefited from the advice of John Dichtl, Andy Evans, Lydia Murdoch, Diane Pecknold, Timothy Pursell, Paul Schadewald, Tim Schmitz, Scott Stephan, and Steve Warren. Archivist Claudia Rivers at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) offered generous assistance at an early stage in this research. Rebecca Craver of the UTEP Institute of Oral History was particularly enthusiastic in introducing me to the institute’s wonderful collection. At the Indiana University Library, Lou Malcomb in the Government Publications Department proved a wonderful ally in my efforts to identify and locate useful government source materials. I also wish to thank Archivist Paul Wormser, who provided me invaluable assistance identifying useful materials in the collections of the National Archives’ Pacific Region–Laguna Niguel branch. In the course of presenting portions of this research, I received advice and encouragement from borderlands scholars Yolanda Leyva, Oscar Martinez, Marjorie Sanchez-Walker, and Miguel Tinker-

Salas. I also thank the anonymous readers for the University of Texas Press, who offered very cogent suggestions. I am fortunate to have had wonderful colleagues with whom to work at California State University, Sacramento. I especially thank Christopher Castaneda, Jeffrey Dym, Brian Schoen, George Craft, Mona Siegel, and Aaron Cohen for their friendship and advice. For several years I allowed this book to take a backseat to other responsibilities, but when I decided to pursue publication, I found encouragement at every turn from my colleagues. I also thank my former student, Katie McCoy, who provided some timely research assistance in turn-of-the-century San Diego newspapers. As a graduate student, I received significant support from the Indiana University Department of History, including a Hill Fellowship and the Paul V. McNutt Dissertation Fellowship. Indiana University’s College of Arts and Sciences provided travel funds that supported presentation of my research. A Research Travel Grant from the Center for American History at the University of Texas, Austin, helped me access their wonderful resources. At California State University, Sacramento, I received financial support in the form of a Research and Creative Activity Summer Fellowship in the summer of 2002. I thank my parents, especially my father, for teaching me as a child to see undocumented workers for what they were: hard-working individuals trying to secure a better life for themselves and their families. Orange County, California, in the 1970s was not known for its progressive politics, and a host of influences stood poised to give me a different set of ideas about the meanings of these “illegal” humans in our midst. But my father, not exactly politically progressive himself, taught me well. Without those lessons this work might never have been born. For as long as I can remember, I have relied heavily on the love and support of my siblings: Maggie, Joseph, Cate, Ginny, John, Mary Pat, and Barbara. Barb was especially helpful at various moments in my undergraduate career and in helping me think about graduate studies. My sisters Cate and Ginny have, in their own lives, demonstrated the power of hard work, self-discipline, and determination, and each has long served as an inspiration to me. I was truly blessed that they took an interest in my academic work and encouraged me. Ginny’s wise counsel, loving support, and enduring sense of humor were simply essential. May at least a fraction of what she has so selflessly given to my family and me return to her in the coming years.





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My children, Cate and Connor, made finishing this work at once far more difficult and far more rewarding. Of course, they have made everything much more meaningful, interesting, and fun all along the way. Those who know my wife Laura understand how very much I am indebted to her. I dare not imagine where I might be without her patience, wisdom, good sense, and wonderful sense of humor. I could not ask for a better partner in life.



Acknowledgments

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Introduction

This book explores part of the history of immigration into the United States, in particular the history of smuggling, undocumented immigration, and border enforcement on American land borders at the turn of the twentieth century. Although popularly conceived of as a relatively recent phenomenon, surreptitious border crossings of immigrants into the United States date back at least as far as the 1880s. I was not looking back that far when initiating my research. Indeed, my initial research plans were considerably narrower. Broadly interested in migratory labor, Mexican immigration, and Mexican-American history—and convinced of the importance of all three to the story of the modern American West—I intended to explore the beginnings of Mexican undocumented immigration from Mexico in the early twentieth century. But as I began to investigate the development of immigration enforcement mechanisms on the U.S.Mexican border and the coincident rise of undocumented Mexican immigration, I quickly discovered the inadequacies of my historical framing. The period, place, and personae of my study changed almost as quickly as I had begun. First, I unwittingly found myself pulled deeper into the past. I was surprised to learn that what I had taken to be primarily a twentiethcentury phenomenon, undocumented immigration, had been prevalent in the nineteenth century as well—so prevalent, in fact, that attempts to stem undocumented immigration had produced significant political passion and consumed the energies of federal authorities as early as the 1880s. Too, my research demanded that I venture northward geographically. I learned the extent to which illicit immigration had been not simply a phenomenon on the Mexican border but also an extensive one on the Canadian border as well. By the 1890s the Canadian border had become a central focus of immigration authorities, and it was along that international border, not the Mexican boundary, that American political leaders and officials first experimented with visions of “sealing” a border. Finally, although the secondary literature revealed that Chinese immigrants had

been actively engaged in smuggling and illicit entry at the turn of the century, I was astounded to discover that immigrants of many different nationalities had, at one time or another, used the contiguous land borders as a way around American immigration restrictions. What I had assumed would be a work focused on Mexican immigrants instead turned into one encompassing Irish, Chinese, Italian, Greek, Japanese, and Lebanese immigrants, among others. Mexican immigrants came into the picture only toward the end of the period under study. Disruptive and disorienting as they sometimes felt, these intellectual journeys—to the late nineteenth century, to the northern border, and into the thick of a multinational assortment of immigrants—provided me with unexpected discoveries that ultimately enriched my abilities to conceptualize and interpret Mexican undocumented entry as it emerged after 1900. Most important, they provided further evidence for what became one of the animating premises and visions of this work: defiance of immigration restrictions was a seemingly natural, almost reflexive response for some aspiring immigrants, and the determination and resourcefulness of those immigrants made border enforcement perennially difficult. The ingenuity of immigrants and smugglers, coupled with the expansive physical geographies of both the northern and southern frontiers, made undocumented entry a feasible alternative for hundreds of thousands of excluded or excludable aliens determined to reach the United States. I began with the assumption that the institutionalization of official border-crossing restrictions on Mexicans in the 1920s had had a transformative effect on Mexican immigration, something that historian George Sánchez had noted in his study of Mexican migrants to 1920s Los Angeles.1 Yet knowledge of the post–World War II history of Mexican immigration—and especially the widespread practice of undocumented immigration—suggested that the power of the new border control regime was in fact less far-reaching. How much did the border itself and cross-border patterns of immigration change at that time? As I began to chronicle developments in border enforcement over the longer period from 1882 to 1930, my uncertainty over assessing the degree of change deepened. Two seemingly contradictory stories seemed to emerge. One narrative dwelt on change. In terms of the rigor of immigration controls in place, both the Canadian and the Mexican borders changed dramatically in the years under study. They went from being virtually unguarded in the 1880s to being heavily patrolled by 1930. By 1930, highly visible, dedicated immigration inspection and patrol forces had been put in place on the nation’s borders, and they enjoyed some considerable suc



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cesses in enforcing immigration laws. From another perspective, however, continuities seemed to prevail, especially on the southern border. Advances in enforcement proceeded remarkably slowly, and they were not themselves clearly responsible for the declines that did occur in smuggling and illicit entry. From the perspective of American officials on the Mexican border, smuggling and undocumented entry became steadily worse problems during this period of time. Despite the ever-growing federal resources being devoted to border enforcement, preventing the passage of “undesirable” aliens remained an elusive goal even in 1930. On balance, the abilities of the U.S. government to police entry across the Mexican border increased measurably during this period, yet those abilities remained circumscribed in important ways. Border-crossing patterns changed, but practices of illicit entry survived, practices that had profound implications for the history of the twentieth-century American West. Nothing had quite prepared me to be immersed in creating a narrative in which simultaneously so much and so little seemed to change. This history of border enforcement and undocumented immigration is an effort, then, to understand and explain how a border to which so many resources had been devoted could undergo such little fundamental change. It intersects with scholarship on American immigration policy and enforcement, Chinese and Mexican immigration to the American West, and the histories of the Mexican-American and Canadian-American borderlands. Through the 1980s, relatively few scholars had examined the history of border-crossing policies and practices. When they did, the focus generally fell on the Mexican border in the context of Mexican labor migration. Scholars of American immigration policy took different tacks in explaining the development of the Mexican border as a flexible “backdoor” source of cheap labor, documented and undocumented, in the opening decades of the twentieth century. Looking at the issue from the point of view of labor policy, Kitty Calavita has suggested that a weakly enforced Mexican border resulted from the contradictory pressures inherent in restricting immigration in a capitalist society. As it crafted quota legislation in 1921, the U.S. Congress sought to balance the “ominous predictions of the economic and political consequences of continued mass immigration” with capitalism’s demand for a surplus labor force. Congress responded by exempting Western Hemisphere immigrants from the quotas, thus permitting Mexican workers to continue to enter without an annual ceiling and encouraging the continued articulation of cross-border labor

Introduction



migration.2 Like Calavita, Keith Fitzgerald acknowledges that the United States has “never dealt effectively with migration across the border with Mexico,” but he argues that the weakness of immigration enforcement on the Mexican border resulted from the particular way in which immigration restrictions developed politically from the 1880s through 1924. “The social movements that nationalized immigration policy in the United States,” Fitzgerald claims, “were not concerned with the circulation of farm labor across the borders of the South and particularly the West.” Consequently, “the exclusion of Mexican . . . immigration from frontgate control allowed circulatory labor migration to become an important feature of southwestern economic development.”3 Historians of Mexican immigration have generally depicted early border enforcement efforts and the rise of Mexican undocumented immigration in terms similar to those of Calavita. Seminal works on Mexican immigration, such as Carey McWilliams’s North from Mexico and Mark Reisler’s By the Sweat of Their Brow, have noted the power that southwestern industrial and agricultural leaders held in shaping immigration policy and border enforcement practices. The recruitment of Mexican workers as a source of cheap labor for that region ensued from failed efforts to employ first Chinese and then Japanese workers, especially in the burgeoning agricultural industry of California in the 1910s. Just as employers in the Southwest became increasingly reliant on Mexican workers, so too Mexican workers became increasingly reliant on the economic strategy of migratory labor. When modifications to American immigration law in the late 1910s and 1920s made border crossing more expensive or difficult for these workers, they increasingly adopted surreptitious entry as a means to preserve their livelihood.4 But while scholarship on American border enforcement once centered on Mexican immigration across the Mexican border, it has broadened its focus markedly in the past two decades. New scholarship on immigration has begun to explore the complex, transnational patterns of migration that occurred across both the Mexican and Canadian international borders and to examine more closely the history of border enforcement itself. As immigration historian Erika Lee has insightfully documented in At America’s Gates, Chinese migrants barred from entry by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act pioneered routes of illicit entry into the United States across the Canadian and Mexican borders in the late nineteenth century. In fact, surreptitious migration of Chinese laborers into the American West first drew attention to the peculiar difficulties of enforcing immigration laws along the international borders. Lee’s work details both the



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border-crossing methods of Chinese immigrants and smugglers and the gradual articulation of a federal immigration bureaucracy designed to hinder their passage. That bureaucracy, Lee concludes, largely succeeded in limiting Chinese undocumented entry across the borders by 1917.5 Historian George Sánchez’s Becoming Mexican American offers one of the first detailed analyses of this new border control regime, particularly as it affected northbound Mexican workers. For Sánchez, the elaboration of the border control regime in the opening decades of the century—and in particular the establishment of the Border Patrol in 1924—significantly altered the practical meanings of the border. During the early part of the twentieth century, he argues, “crossing over from Mexico was transformed from a casual and easy task—with perhaps few questions asked by officials—to a tense and formal ritual of suspicion.” By making entry and reentry of Mexican workers more difficult, the strengthened border caused members of the nascent Mexican-American community in Los Angeles to increasingly shift from cyclical migration patterns to settlement.6 A similar picture of a “modernizing,” hardening border emerges from Alexandra Stern’s careful study of the institutionalization and professionalization of immigrant medical inspections on the Mexican border.7 Mae Ngai’s brilliant sociolegal study of twentieth-century immigration policy, Impossible Subjects, builds on the understanding that “immigration restriction produced the illegal alien as a new legal and political subject.” She argues convincingly that U.S. immigration policy, especially as it was codified in the 1924 National Origins Act, “remapped the nation” by establishing a “racial and national hierarchy that favored some immigrants over others.”8 She also notes that new immigration restrictions led inexorably to a focus on building effective border controls. But Ngai largely ignores the implications for the borders of the first forty years of restrictive legislation. She suggests that the federal officials “paid little attention to the nation’s land borders” before the 1920s, with the result that both borders were “soft” until World War I. She instead finds a “new sense of territoriality” born in the immigration restrictions enacted in the 1920s. Those laws, she argues, brought an “unprecedented awareness and state surveillance of the nation’s contiguous land borders.” 9 While a broader commitment to border enforcement and deportation efforts did in fact arise in the 1920s, substantial federal border control efforts had existed since at least the 1890s. Anxieties about the nation’s porous borders existed well before the 1920s, and a proper examination of the evolving dynamics of undocumented immigration across American borders requires a closer look at this earlier period. As we shall see, the “soft”

Introduction



or permeable borders that existed prior to the 1920s cannot be explained as simply the result of federal neglect. Immigration regulation and border fortifications emerged not only in the United States but also in other areas of the globe in this period, as various nation-states introduced passport restrictions and border controls to regulate international migration.10 Aristide Zolberg’s comparative studies of migration controls in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century detail “the erection of a global network of barriers that successfully confined most of the world’s population in their countries of birth.” This successful imposition of border controls, he concludes, constituted a “remarkable demonstration of how apparently irresistible historical trends can be contradicted . . . by concerted human action.”11 In a similar vein, scholars of the American experience such as Lee, Sánchez, and Ngai, whether focusing on borders through the prism of either the Chinese or the Mexican experience, emphasize the successful imposition of state power at the nation’s international boundaries. That is, these authors accentuate the power of the bureaucratic fortifications put in place to govern border crossings by the 1920s. Without doubt, the process of crossing a border into the United States had changed markedly by 1930. This book, however, emphasizes government officials’ limited ability to enforce border-crossing regulations to their satisfaction. Part of that story has to do with human agency, exemplified in the activities of both highly organized smuggling entrepreneurs and ordinary migrants. Others who have published on the Chinese immigrant experience, including Lucy Salyer and Erika Lee, have cast the story of Chinese exclusion as, in part, one of successful resistance. Salyer has argued persuasively that excluded Chinese immigrants, when they are discussed at all, have too often been portrayed as “the defenseless victims of an all-powerful Bureau of Immigration.” Her work documents the ways in which Chinese immigrants—and the powerful ethnic organizations with an economic stake in their arrival—achieved remarkable success in using the federal courts to creatively undermine the provisions of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Chinese immigrants, by exploiting legal loopholes, inventing relationships, and forging documents, severely constrained the ability of the Bureau of Immigration to effectively administer the exclusion laws.12 Lee presents a similar portrait. While the Chinese exclusion laws “marginalized and constrained generations of Chinese immigrants and the Chinese community in America,” the Chinese, individually and collectively, battled the restrictions. They did so, notes Lee, “in court, in public, in the press . . . and by evading the exclusion laws altogether



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through illegal immigration.”13 My study shows that inventive resistance on the part of immigrants extended beyond the Chinese, becoming a pervasive feature of the borderlands. Immigrants from around the globe— and the smuggling rings that often assisted them—used artifice and stealth along the nation’s contiguous land borders to undermine the enforcement of American immigration laws. The research for this book took place in the context of growing interest in revising interpretations of the American immigrant experience through the prism of race. In part, this has taken the form of debates over the degree to which various selected European groups (Irish, Italians) were regarded as racially different by Americans or considered “white upon arrival.”14 But it has also emerged from attention to the experiences of immigrant groups marginalized in various ways by immigration policy and American jurisprudence. The classic work on American nativism, John Higham’s Strangers in the Land, aptly addressed the role of race in the immigration restriction movement. But his larger interpretation suggested that bouts of nativism were aberrations in a national history otherwise marked by a largely benevolent openness to newcomers.15 More recent scholars, propelled by new scholarship on the experiences of Mexican, Chinese, Filipino, and other “nonwhite” immigrant peoples, have argued for reinterpretations of immigration history that demythologize the image of the United States as a nation offering limitless refuge. Erika Lee, for example, argues that the Chinese Exclusion Act “transformed the United States into a gatekeeping nation” after 1882. “Understanding the racialized origins of American gatekeeping,” Lee writes, “provides a powerful counternarrative to the popular ‘immigrant paradigm’ that celebrates the United States as a ‘nation of immigrants.’” In a similar vein, Mae Ngai uses the 1924 Quota Act and its consequences to contest “the myth of ‘immigrant America.’” “The telos of immigrant settlement, assimilation, and citizenship,” she argues, “has been an enduring narrative of American history, but it has not always been the reality.”16 Their influence has spread. In his authoritative new history of American immigration history, Paul Spickard states boldly that “race is a central, not marginal, issue in U.S. immigration history.”17 Racial markers and assumptions permeated debates over immigration restrictions and, often, the restrictive laws themselves. Unsurprisingly, they also shaped the practice and culture of undocumented immigration and border enforcement. As I conducted this research, immersed in the shifting perspectives on immigration history, I looked as well at the history of the border regions, particularly the Mexican borderlands. And I found myself increasingly

Introduction



in tune with the ideas of historian of the West Patricia Nelson Limerick, who in her influential 1984 book, The Legacy of Conquest, described the U.S.-Mexico border as a “social fiction.” Limerick places the twentiethcentury “border problem” of undocumented Mexican immigration in the broader context of American “frontier” history. In confronting this border problem, she argues, the United States began wrestling with the same problem that had plagued successive Spanish and Mexican regimes since the eighteenth century: how to keep self-interested individuals—traders, migrants, filibusterers, bandits—from ignoring national boundaries. Like earlier national authorities, twentieth-century immigration officials confronted the uncomfortable fact that “it is one thing to draw an arbitrary geographical line between two spheres of sovereignty [and] . . . another to persuade people to respect it.”18 If Limerick’s conceptualization of the border resonates with my conclusions about border enforcement efforts, so too do some of the ideas emerging from scholars studying other aspects of U.S.-Mexico borderlands history. An important distillation of ideas about the modern U.S.Mexico borderlands came with the 2004 publication of Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History. The book’s contributors examined various aspects of what editors Samuel Truett and Elliott Young consider to be the formative era of the modern borderlands (1820s–1940s), a period “marked by a simultaneous opening and closing of borders.”19 My research represents part of an answer to the useful historical question Truett and Young pose in their introduction: “What happened when fuzzy and mobile frontiers—first of empires, then nations—gave way to more fixed national boundaries?” And my conclusions about immigration enforcement efforts around the turn of the twentieth century echo the conclusions of other scholars who state that control of the official border “was more dream than reality.”20 From the point of view of border immigration controls, the period saw the simultaneous drawing and erasing of the official border, its gradual articulation and elaboration in the midst of consistently successful efforts to undermine it. In effect, the practical erasing of the border began almost from the very start. For all the differences among the hundreds of thousands of individuals who participated in illicit border crossings over the five decades of this study—differences of timing, intentions, routes, and reliance on smugglers—together they represented a challenge to state power over human mobility. Year after year and decade after decade, official sources bemoaned the tremendous advantages smugglers and undocumented immigrants had over immigration officials on American land



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borders. Begrudgingly, but with great regularity, immigration officials on the borders from 1882 through 1930 detailed the endless creativity of immigrants bent on illicit entry. It was their tireless, pressing energy at the points of contact—most frequently, the land borders—that resulted in widespread contravention of American immigration restrictions. The theme of ordinary individuals resisting state power resonates with much that has been written on national borders generally and on the U.S.-Mexico border in particular. As others have noted, there has “always been an enormous gap between the rhetoric of border maintenance and daily life in borderlands.” “If there is one thing that has been central to all borders,” write the authors of an essay on the comparative histories of borderlands, “it has been the contest about . . . rules of inclusion and exclusion and the efforts of people to use, manipulate, or avoid the resulting border restrictions.” Borders are part of the visible apparatus by which states attempt to effect state power. But in their attempt to demonstrate national sovereignty, the extent to which a state’s borders can “impose their jurisdiction on ‘the people’” is up for grabs.21 In the late nineteenth century, migrants and smugglers created methods of illicit entry that kept these borders open—and border officials at their wit’s end. Astute observers of the U.S.-Mexico border, including Oscar Martinez and Jorge Bustamante, have worked with themes of resistance as well, but they have focused mainly on borderland denizens. While acknowledging the manner in which the “delineation and maintenance” of the border has affected people living in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, including the “formation of their lifestyles, attitudes, and cultural orientation,” they also point to the inherent weaknesses of that border.22 In his portrait of late twentieth-century border life, Martinez celebrates the “creative spirit of borderlanders,” especially their resourcefulness in circumventing official restrictions along the binational border and their “ingenuity . . . in getting what they want regardless of legal abstractions.” As Martinez correctly notes, contemporary borderland residents who attempt to meet their personal needs by engaging in small-scale smuggling are simply “carrying on a local tradition that began in the nineteenth century.”23 This book argues that such illicit traditions were not the sole possession of borderland residents; generations of immigrants, from Mexico and from afar, developed sets of similar traditions for circumventing U.S. immigration laws to meet their personal and family needs. Scholars of contemporary immigration recognize the limited degree to which liberal states can effectively control immigration across their borders. Officials in the receiving countries of the United States, Canada, and

Introduction



Western Europe have become, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, measurably less confident in their states’ abilities to “effectively regulate immigration flows.”24 According to one study on guest worker migration in Europe, “It has been migrants and their employers—not governments—that have determined the magnitude and destination of migration flows in most parts of the world. The most that governments can do is to facilitate or impede these population movements; not to stop them.” Building on this observation—that migrants enmeshed in a labor market largely determine volumes of border crossings—Wayne Cornelius has argued that governments face “severe limits” on their capacity to intervene successfully in contemporary migration flows.25 The ungovernability of transnational migrations, owing to the creativity of migrants and the demands of the labor market, thus appears a constant not only across time but also across space. Rereading the late nineteenth-century reports of frustrated immigration authorities on the borders, one wonders that confidence in the state’s ability did not evaporate sooner than it did. Although the course of my research led me away from a narrow focus on Mexican immigration, a fundamental interest in the twentieth-century Mexican experiences with the U.S. border lies behind this work. Arguably, no single factor exerted greater influence on the Mexican-American experience in the twentieth century than the geographic contiguity of the United States and Mexico. Throughout the course of the twentieth century, Mexican migrants and immigrants, many legal but far more undocumented, almost continuously invigorated Mexican-American communities from Chicago to Dallas to Los Angeles, renewing homeland links and creating a climate favorable to sustenance of language and cultural ties. In essence, the proximity of Mexico has allowed this continued infusion of migrants and immigrants that has marked the exceptional quality of the Mexican immigrant experience; a migration without end, it has developed complicated community formation dynamics that are in many ways unique in American immigration history.26 Understanding the historical development of this boundary into a permeable border is centrally important to Mexican-American history. At the same time that the border helps explain differences between the Mexican immigrant experience and those of other national groups, it also links the Mexican experience to those of other groups. Patterns of undocumented border migration from the 1880s through the 1920s suggest Mexican immigrants have acted very much like their European and Asian counterparts when confronting immigration restrictions. Mexican undocumented immigration can only truly be understood within the larger

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context of smuggling and undocumented entry by Irish, Chinese, Italian, Greek, Japanese, Lebanese, English, and other immigrants. Mexicans were only the most recent—and most successful—group to use the border as a “back door” into the United States. This book proceeds chronologically. The opening chapter details the incremental growth in anti-immigrant passions and restrictive immigration legislation in the United States up through the 1880s. By the mid-1880s the United States had begun to draw distinctions among the immigrants arriving at its shores, barring the migration of paupers, convicts, the mentally infirm, Chinese workers, and workers under contract. As experiments in the ongoing American project to define its identity—what it should and should not be—immigration restrictions on these groups naturally heightened U.S. concern with defining and defending its borders; in drawing these first intellectual boundaries precluding some from entry into the American community, national authorities were unwittingly altering the meanings of the nation’s physical boundaries as well. Chapter 2 demonstrates how these efforts to restrict certain groups of immigrants from entering at American seaports led directly to the adoption of routes of entry across the Canadian and Mexican borders. By the late 1880s, significant numbers of English, Irish, and Chinese migrants were pioneering new routes into the United States via the virtually unpatrolled northern and southern borders of the United States, alarming immigration officials and restrictionists alike. The experiences with national immigration restrictions in the 1880s introduced patterns on the borders of smuggling, illicit entry, and border policing that presaged developments through 1930 and beyond. Alerted to the essentially permeable nature of these borders, restrictionists began to pressure the federal government to better enforce immigration laws on American land borders. Chapter 3 continues the narrative by showing how the formation of the modern border control regime after 1891 was rooted both in a sense of crisis at the border’s permeability and in the confident spirit that the border could be rendered impermeable. Reacting to reports that immigrants routinely evaded immigration controls along the borders, lawmakers and officials explored means of mobilizing manpower, management expertise, and technology to combat undocumented entrants on the Canadian and Mexican borders. At the same time, however, they significantly expanded the scope of immigration restrictions themselves and fostered further undocumented border entries of Greeks, Lebanese, Italians, and others. When Canadian authorities themselves began enforcing immigration re

Introduction

11

strictions at the century’s end, the Mexican border increasingly became the preferred route for these barred immigrants. In Chapter 4 I turn, with the immigrants, to a principal focus on the Mexican border. Even as the United States imagined the means by which to draw an enforceable line between Mexico and the United States, individual immigrants and elaborate smuggling rings conspired to keep the border permeable in the 1900s. This chapter details some of the more effective and imaginative schemes by which migrants sought to pass through the official ports of entry or in the vast lightly patrolled spaces in between. Continuing chronologically, Chapter 5 chronicles how the emergence of Mexican migration patterns between 1900 and 1920 complicated efforts to enforce immigration law on the border. Beginning in the 1890s, a variety of developments in the United States and Mexico led to significant Mexican labor migration into the United States. While border officials after 1910 experienced a respite from their battles with European and Asian immigrants entering through Mexico, the flow of Mexican migrants, temporary and permanent, escalated during the 1910s. Efforts to apply immigration laws to Mexicans fell victim through the 1910s to revolutionary disorder and the labor market pressures coincident with the economic development of the American Southwest. The final chapter examines developments in the 1920s. Mexican nationals, who had become subject to restrictions beginning in 1917, turned increasingly to practices of undocumented entry in the 1920s. At the same time, a new system of national quotas imposed on European immigrants in 1921 led to a sudden renaissance of European smuggling through Mexico. With these converging patterns bringing undocumented entry to an all-time high, Congress in 1924 created a dedicated Border Patrol within the Immigration Service. By 1929, political pressure to limit Mexican immigration had led to administrative reforms that, along with the new Border Patrol and the economic crisis of the 1930s, succeeded in slowing flows of both legal and undocumented Mexicans into the United States. The epilogue explores the degree to which this border control success after 1929 was illusory, having more to do with the effects of the Great Depression than with American efforts to enforce the border. I close with reflections on how this chronicle of border enforcement efforts and undocumented immigration can be read as a story of both continuity and profound change.



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T h e Menaces W it hou t: Immigr ant Aliens and t he Or igi ns of Immigr at ion Restr ict ions

Chapter 1

I have stood near Castle Garden and seen races of far greater peril to us than the Irish. I have seen the Hungarians, and the Italians and the Poles. I have seen these poor wretches trooping out, wretches physically, wretches mentally, wretches morally, and stood there almost trembling for my country, and said, what shall we do if this thing keeps on? E. H. Johnson, Crozier Theological Seminary, 1888

At the close of the 1880s, El Paso, Texas, stood on the threshold of tremendous growth. Freshly laid railroad lines linked the small border town not only with major trading centers in the United States, such as New Orleans, San Francisco, and St. Louis, but also with Mexico City and the economically promising borderlands of northern Mexico. American investment in Mexico, which had grown under the liberal economic policies of Mexican president Porfirio Díaz, had helped stimulate the railroad network that now led into and out of Mexico through El Paso.1 In May 1882, as a sign of American commitment to Mexican trade, El Paso had received congressional approval for a new international bridge spanning the Rio Grande.2 The city’s population was swelling with Anglo and Mexican settlers as boosters began to imagine the city’s transformation from marginal border outpost to desert entrepôt. The El Paso Smelter began operations in 1887, processing ore from the mines springing up in the nearby borderland states of New Mexico, Arizona, and Chihuahua.3 In his annual message to Congress in December 1890, President Benjamin Harrison gushed about the promising prospects for American commercial relations with its southern neighbor: “The intercourse of the two countries, by rail, already great, is making constant growth. The established lines and those recently projected add to the intimacy of traffic and open new channels of access to fresh areas of supply and demand.”4 U.S.-Mexican economic relations and the international border itself were indeed being transformed in the 1880s and 1890s by an expanding

transnational railroad network that was shrinking the space between the two nations. The vibrancy of El Paso testified to the dynamic possibilities of the emerging transnational economic ties. But those very same rail lines providing “intimacy of traffic” between the nations would have profound implications for patterns of immigration to the United States in the coming decades, implications that Harrison and other national leaders would find disturbing. Months after Harrison wholeheartedly endorsed the international arteries of trade, his administration caught a glimpse of the fuller implications of improved transportation links across the border. In the latter half of 1891, reports emerged that Chinese workers, barred from entering the United States under the provisions of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, had taken to smuggling themselves across the U.S.-Mexican border into Texas. By December 1891, thirty-five Chinese immigrants had been apprehended in the Texas border towns of Del Rio and Eagle Pass. “A large portion of those recently captured,” according to a newspaper account, “were imported from Cuba by railroad contractors in Mexico.” With the northern sections of the Monterey and Mexican Gulf Road completed, “hundreds of them were thrown out of employment, and they are now making their way into the United States in large numbers.”5 Only a year after extolling the virtues of a transportation network that provided “channels of access to fresh areas of supply and demand,” Harrison included in his next message to Congress a brief item that we might take as an acknowledgment that the laws of supply and demand sometimes supplied problems as well. In contravention of American law, he reported, “a very considerable number of Chinese laborers have during the past year entered the United States from Canada and Mexico.”6 These Chinese railroad workers who crossed into Texas in 1891 were hardly the first “excludable” Chinese immigrants detected trying to cross the Mexican border into the United States in search of opportunity. A substantial amount of cross-border smuggling had been carried on for several years further west across the Sonora-Arizona and Baja California– California portions of the international border. But these illicit Chinese border crossings in the fall of 1891 and the alarm they caused in Washington suggest why a work focusing on the turn-of-the-century U.S.-Mexico border must begin with an account of immigration policy debates that were physically, temporally, and culturally remote from border life.7 For even as the United States was building bridges across the Mexican border in the 1880s, it was also beginning to fashion walls. To understand the development of the official U.S.-Mexican border

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from 1880 through 1930, it is necessary to understand the dynamics of immigration in the late nineteenth-century United States, and in particular the growing spirit of restrictionism shaping immigration policy at the last century’s close. This chapter explores these themes, tracing the intellectual origins of the modern border control regime to immigration reforms of the 1880s. As Americans in the 1880s debated the desired contours of the community of citizens within the United States, they inevitably drew intellectual boundaries of exclusion that would in turn drastically change life in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. In various ways, immigrants during the 1860s and 1870s had increasingly come to be construed as external threats to the welfare of the United States: as carriers of disease and moral disorder, culturally inassimilable others, threats to the political order and social stability, and unfree labor. During the early 1880s, various groups of aliens became subject to new federal immigration restrictions, and by 1885 separate pieces of legislation had placed Chinese workers, contract laborers, paupers, convicts, and the mentally infirm outside the boundaries of acceptable immigration. In the arguments brought against them we can glimpse the variety of fears— racial, cultural, and economic—that motivated nativists and propelled the movement to restrict immigration. And we can catch, too, a glimpse of the peculiar passions that underwrote the American commitment to a vast project of border law enforcement.

A Period of Unregulated Immigration The growing population of British North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries resulted from complex and sometimes contradictory impulses and processes reflecting American and British needs. By 1700 the colonies had become not only a haven for political and religious refugees from Europe and “the best poor man’s country” for yeoman Protestants but also a penal camp for British convicts and the site of unfree labor for African slaves and indentured servants. Throughout the colonial period, established settlers had evinced a fair amount of anxiety about new arrivals in their communities. But colonists’ efforts to define and deny entry to “undesirable elements” had been limited by the greater authority of colonial and proprietary officials. Not surprisingly, then, the newly independent colonies after 1783 immediately took an interest in matters of immigration policy.8 Currents of xenophobia and nativism existed from the founding of the American republic, and influential American voices at that time be

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moaned some of the more deleterious effects of immigration. In part, their concerns arose from their belief that the republican form of government required a virtuous, educated, and politically principled citizenry. It was in this vein that Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, worried about the unwelcome influence of immigrant newcomers on the young nation. Refugees from the “absolute monarchies” of Europe would constitute the “greatest number of immigrants” to the United States, he wrote in 1782, and “they will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, or if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness.” Still, the idea of generally open immigration held firm ideological ground in the early republic, even if it was not uncontested. Jefferson, like his contemporaries, believed that the prosperity and power of the new nation depended on the American population increasing, and such misgivings about immigrants were always tempered by the knowledge that immigration was principally a boon. At the same time, the American Revolution deepened the ideological commitment of the former colonists to the idea of America as an asylum for liberty.9 Yet concerns such as Jefferson’s about the qualities that immigrants brought to America persisted, and six years later, in 1788, the Continental Congress, which itself did not hold authority over matters of immigration under the Articles of Confederation, unanimously resolved to recommend “to the several states to pass laws for preventing the transportation of convicted malefactors from foreign countries into the United States.” In that same year, both New York and Massachusetts enacted laws barring the importation of paupers. Economic self-interest and principle might make broader efforts to restrict immigration to the new republic unthinkable, but there was little doubt that, in the words of historian Marilyn Baseler, “America’s preferred immigrant was the propertied, industrious, committed republican rather than the ‘wretched refuse’ from Europe’s ‘teeming shores.’”10 Convicts, paupers, traitors, and the dissolute found no welcome. Congress first placed limits on immigration through the deportation provisions of the unpopular Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which granted the president authority to deport aliens deemed treasonous or otherwise dangerous to the peace and safety of the country.11 Although these acts and the spirit in which they were drafted, which one historian describes as the Federalist’s “hysterical determination to check foreign radicalism,” did not endure, their passage provides an early illustration of one of the perennial positions that immigrants would hold in the American imagination: as foreign radicals and agitators.12

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The idea of immigrants as foreign radicals would retain a degree of currency throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although its importance as an element of anti-immigrant, nativist sentiments would be eclipsed by economic, religious, and racial concerns.13 Broader antiimmigrant sentiments, reflecting an anti-Catholic strain, first emerged forcefully in the 1830s with the organization of local nativist political parties that opposed the increasing numbers and influence of Irish Catholic immigrants in the United States. Themselves emerging from the confluence of evangelical Protestantism, urban social reform efforts, and native white working-class anxieties, such groups cast the newly arrived Irish as importers of crime, poverty, drunkenness, and disease. Nativist activists in the 1830s and 1840s focused more on limiting immigrant access to naturalization than on immigration restriction. Their influence, and that of the short-lived American Party and Know-Nothingism, would be limited for the most part to the state and local arena. The Native American Association of Washington did succeed, in 1838, in getting the House Judiciary Committee to investigate the immigration of convicts and paupers, but the committee’s proposed legislative remedy, a federal restriction on immigration of vagabonds, criminals, and paupers, never received action. Congressional unwillingness to meddle in matters of immigration policy had perhaps as much to do with politics—the immigrant vote had already come to be decisive in many eastern states and cities—as with the fact that powerful economic interests still perceived a strong need for immigrant labor.14 While organized nativists realized little success in changing immigration laws, some state governments from the mid-1820s did take steps to limit certain types of immigrants. In 1820 the state of Massachusetts began discouraging the migration of paupers by requiring ship captains to post bond for those immigrants who authorities believed might become public charges. In 1824 the legislature of New York followed suit, establishing a similar provision for masters of vessels landing immigrants at the Port of New York.15 But most of these state efforts to mold immigration to their own suiting ultimately did not survive court challenges. Although the U.S. Constitution contained provisions for Congress to establish rules for the naturalization of foreign immigrants, it remained silent on the matter of authority to regulate immigration, other than through a clause intended to address the importation of slaves. Beginning with an 1849 Supreme Court ruling that immigration constituted foreign commerce, a series of court decisions began to point toward the need for a stronger federal role in immigration. A crucial turning point came in the

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March 1876 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Henderson v. Mayor of the City of New York, in which the court ruled state efforts to collect taxes on arriving immigrants unconstitutional because they violated Congress’s constitutional authority to regulate commerce.16 This decision effectively prohibited states from levying landing taxes, directly or indirectly, on incoming aliens, undermining state efforts to regulate immigration. In the wake of the Henderson decision, state charity officials from New York and elsewhere began demanding federal immigration legislation.17 The federal government, then, slowly and reluctantly came to assume a central role in the regulation of immigration into the United States. As late as the 1870s it still had only a very limited direct involvement in matters of immigration. Since 1819 the Department of State had been required to keep lists of legal immigrants to the United States. In addition, Congress had seen fit to pass several steerage acts between 1819 and 1882 designed to improve conditions for passengers en route to the United States. But it passed no restrictive laws. Indeed, it had actually encouraged immigration for a brief period of time beginning in 1864 by passing a contract labor law designed to counter labor shortages occasioned by the Civil War.18 It was not until 1875 that Congress ushered in the period of selective immigration by passing the first restrictive immigration legislation, targeted at the importation of prostitutes and contracted laborers from China. But in a more general sense, the period of federal restriction began in earnest in the early 1880s with the passage of three acts establishing restrictions on immigration to the United States.19

Nativism and the Birth of Immigration Restrictions Supreme Court decisions may have placed the issue of immigration regulation firmly in the hands of Congress, but nativist impulses, submerged in the political turmoil of the Civil War and Reconstruction but reemergent in the economic crises of the 1870s and 1880s, created the political climate in which Congress abandoned its traditional reluctance to address immigration issues.20 The swirl of ideas and fears about immigrant “others” that had been latent in American culture for the past century coalesced in the 1870s and 1880s in an environment of economic uncertainty and social stress. American labor groups stood at the fore of a larger movement toward reexamining the role of immigration in American life. But other groups as well, under the stresses of economic change, urbanization, and labor conflict, began to address the issue of immigration.

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Even before the May 1886 events in Haymarket Square in Chicago unleashed an anti-immigrant hysteria among formerly pro-immigrant industry leaders, small businessmen, white-collar workers, and the emerging middle class, disquiet about immigrants had penetrated American society. Urban reformers in the 1880s, casting about for explanations and solutions to new social problems caused by urbanization, first drew attention to America’s “immigration problem.” They were impelled in part by the fact that economic and political developments in Europe were creating new patterns of emigration to the United States. Beginning in the 1880s, increasing numbers of immigrants from the eastern and southern European regions of Russia, the Balkans, and Italy began to enter the United States. These “new immigrants,” sometimes appearing markedly different from northern Europeans in culture, language, religion, and complexion, were often represented as the “offscourings and unwanted people of Europe.” Fearing that the United States was shifting from a “fluid, homogenous” society to a bleakly polarized society, reformers began to connect the problem of immigrant assimilation to the problems of the day. The old-stock Americans uneasy about the changing face of the nation who founded the Sons of the Revolution in 1883 emphasized their ancestral links to the nation’s founding generation. In 1886, Civil War veterans in the Grand Army of the Republic were being warned of the threats posed by “immigrant scum.” Immigrants, according to a prominent historian of the period, were “linked in one way or another to every festering problem” in 1880s America.21 Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong’s 1885 publication of Our Country, which predicted a coming period of social upheaval and class conflict, laid partial blame on the immigrant influx. Alongside Social Gospel reformers such as Strong stood academics in economic and political science detailing the “evils of unrestricted immigration.” The public discussion of problems linked to immigration “gave intellectual respectability to anti-immigrant feelings.”22 Practical investigations of the effects of immigrants on American society coincided with the rise of a broader scientific interest in the study of racial differences during the latter half of the nineteenth century. From the 1840s on, American historians, political theorists, and others, influenced by Charles Darwin and especially Herbert Spencer, began to “classify human development according to race.”23 Their ethnocentric conclusions gave rise to the Anglo-Saxon myth that identified Americans as the descendants of Germanic and English ancestors with a unique penchant and capacity for democratic government. Ultimately, such theories found their way into nativist ideology and discourse, buttressing contentions

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that immigration somehow endangered the American way of life.24 The prominent Baptist theologian E. H. Johnson sounded this alarming note in 1888: I have stood near Castle Garden and seen races of far greater peril to us than the Irish. I have seen the Hungarians, and the Italians and the Poles. I have seen these poor wretches trooping out, wretches physically, wretches mentally, wretches morally, and stood there almost trembling for my country, and said, what shall we do if this thing keeps on? In the name of God, what shall we do if the American race is to receive constant influx of that sort of thing?25

Immigration, then, by the close of the 1880s, had come increasingly to be regarded less as “an essential condition of material progress, but rather as a problem, the solution to which required urgent and drastic action.”26 In the midst of these intellectual and cultural developments Congress first passed laws to restrict immigration into the United States. Opponents of unregulated immigration trumpeted the specific threats they saw in aliens—the spread of pauperism and social irresponsibility, the introduction of culturally inassimilable others, the undermining of free labor— and fashioned restrictive legislation to keep them out. Congress would spend much of the next five decades proposing, debating, and enacting laws restricting immigration. But the legislative acts of the early 1880s established the basic contours of immigration debates, the fundamental outlines of future American policies, and patterns of enforcement.

Targeting Paupers and Convicts Several perennial concerns about immigration had dominated the period of state control over immigration policy. Paupers and convicts had topped the list of undesirables since the colonial period.27 Not surprisingly, initial federal efforts in the 1880s to regulate immigration mimicked state exclusionary provisions with regard to these individuals. On a practical level, poverty, or pauperism, headed the list. The passage of the Immigration Act of August 1882 resulted in large part from the successful lobbying efforts of state charity directors, who were desperate to replace the monies lost from the immigrant head taxes that the Supreme Court had invalidated in 1876.28 But while their principal interest in federal legislation lay in creating some mechanism by which the federal government could impose a head tax and then return to the states a revenue stream to



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offset local costs, state officials also demonstrated an interest in establishing federal prohibitions on immigrant paupers and convicts. This issue of preventing the entry of “pauper immigrants” had long animated state emigration officials in New York and Massachusetts, the states with the largest volume of immigration through the mid-century decades. While immigrants to the United States frequently arrived with very few resources and in a state of relative poverty, officials assumed that able-bodied immigrants would endeavor to find work as a means of supporting themselves. The fact that some immigrants would come to rely at some point on public or private charity represented a social cost of maintaining a steady (some might say surplus) supply of immigrant workers in the late nineteenth century. But state and local authorities responsible for administering poor relief were particularly sensitive to the costs involved in this equation and ever interested in refining the means by which immigrants likely to turn to public support could be sifted out of the stream. They advocated banning immigrants unable to work by virtue of age or mental or physical infirmity, as well as immigrants with criminal pasts.29 These officials drew attention to the fact that paupers continued to regularly enter the United States in the early 1880s. One source estimated that immigrants constituted two-thirds of the paupers in the state of New York, although they represented less than one-third of the total population. Overlooking the vagaries of the employment marketplace and the real potential that immigrants could suffer physical and mental breakdown under the conditions they found in the United States, officials repeatedly presented such statistics as evidence that foreign paupers were invading the United States in droves. Reports of immigrants being “dumped” in the United States by poor-relief officials in their own countries nurtured that belief.30 Previous efforts to stem the flow of paupers into the United States had directly addressed the programs of assisted emigration that various European countries had experimented with during the nineteenth century. The federal government had, since the 1830s, often protested the practice of British and German officials assisting the emigration of impoverished citizens to the United States.31 For the most part, American efforts to combat assisted emigration plans had occurred within the realm of the State Department, with the United States applying diplomatic pressures on European states to recognize the injustice of intentionally exporting their impoverished subjects to the United States. Those efforts were not uniformly successful.32 The longstanding British policy of en-



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couraging emigration to its own colonies posed a particularly difficult problem. From 1831 through the 1880s, Great Britain had experimented with various programs for sending its subjects, especially the Irish poor, to neighboring British North America, later the Dominion of Canada.33 Both American and British officials recognized that assisted emigration to Canada “indirectly stimulated immigration to the United States” because many emigrants, but especially the Irish, preferred to cross the border and begin their new lives in the United States. Indeed, mid-century debates in the British Houses of Parliament over the wisdom of expending funds for assisted emigration to Canada had turned in part on the matter of how many subjects so transported would ultimately “desert the colony” for the United States.34 Testimony presented in favor of the 1882 bill estimated that “90 percent . . . of the paupers sent to Canada soon find their way into the United States.”35 New York’s Representative John Van Voorhis framed the 1882 Immigration Act with those concerns in mind. The purpose of the act, he proclaimed, was not to place a brake on immigration, but to eliminate the evils incident to immigration . . . which can be and ought to be avoided. One of the chief of these is the advantage which is taken by local governments, municipalities, societies, and individuals of Europe to send to this country the dependent classes of Europe, for the purpose of relieving the countries to which they belong of their support. Thousands of paupers, idiots, lunatics, criminals, and accused persons are being sent to this country at public expense . . . for the sole purpose of shifting onto this country the expense of supporting them.36

Officials may have exaggerated the incidence of assisted emigration, but it did in fact occur, as did unassisted emigration by individuals who ultimately proved unable to provide for themselves. In either case, the difficulty lay in detecting the potential paupers amid a shipload of immigrants. No two inspectors might define the conditions of prospective pauperism in precisely the same terms. In fact, prior to 1882 states had adopted widely varying standards for assessing incoming aliens. New York authorities were notoriously more stringent in examining potential immigrants. In the 1850s, Germans with physical deformities were being cautioned “against taking passage to New York” and advised instead to “go by way of Baltimore, New Orleans, or Quebec, where the laws prohibiting the landing of immigrants of the above classes do not apply.”37 In the course of debate over the 1882 law, its supporters provided accounts of twenty-one deported pauper immigrants from the 1881 annual

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report of the New York State Board of Charities. The examples were illustrative of the types of immigrants that the new law, it was hoped, would prevent from entering the United States. They illustrated too that ideas about who might become a pauper were most intimately linked to notions of productive labor. Hence, aged men or women entering the United States, unless accompanied by or met by family members, were commonly classified as potential paupers. A Baltimore newspaper in the mid-1800s had decried the landing at Norfolk, Virginia, of a ship from Liverpool, England, carrying English paupers, a great many of whom were “from 50 to 60 years of age—some older! . . . John Bull has squeezed the orange, but insolently casts the skin in our faces.”38 Likewise, officials regarded immigrants with physical or mental infirmities likely to interfere with their ability to work as poor risks for admission. Concern about the health of immigrants to the United States, which extended both to their physical and mental condition, had also been a constant issue in state regulations through mid-century. Congressional interest in immigrants as a source of disease had in fact prompted much of the federal legislation regulating the shipboard conditions of passage. With regard to “mental defects,” congressional committees had, as early as 1855, reported favorably on proposals for federal bans on the admittance of “idiots, lunatics, and insane” persons. But, in essence, that report and the 1882 prohibition of immigration of such persons had little to do with matters of health. Rather, they related directly to concerns about pauperism: such immigrants, authorities feared, would be unable to provide for themselves and hence would become wards of state mental institutions. The incapacity of those with either physical or mental defects to provide for themselves emerged as a standard theme in the New York Board of Charities report. Officials simply classified some of the immigrants deported as “imbeciles” or “insane”; several others were portrayed as suffering from the combined effects of mental and physical disabilities, such as the fifty-four-year-old German man “of feeble intellect, and wholly incapacitated by chronic rheumatism and ulceration of the lower extremities.”39 While the identification of potential paupers rested on a calculation of their potential productive value, it also often involved Victorian ideas of morality. Pauperism continued to be viewed by the middle class and elites as evidence of moral failure rather than genuine hard luck in a difficult economic climate. Charity officials urging the passage of the 1882 Immigration Act discouraged viewing paupers as victims of economic dislocations. One New York authority admonished that “nothing is more

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unfounded than the common idea that the inmates of our poorhouses in general are the victims of unavoidable misfortune.” He estimated that two-thirds of the non-mentally ill wards being supported by New York were “paupers by their own criminal acts.” Indeed, observers did make a link between crime and poverty (although not the same one that subsequent generations would make), and excluding the “criminal classes” from entering the country had long been a desire of state authorities.40 American consular officers in Europe through the 1830s and 1840s regularly reported schemes to deport criminals to the United States. An 1866 joint resolution of Congress cited the Swiss, British, and German practice of pardoning criminals who agreed to emigrate to the United States, and in May 1874 Congress demanded an executive department report on the reputed practice of “other governments as to the landing of foreign convicts on our shores.”41 The resulting report indicated only “isolated cases” of convict transportation, but Congress nevertheless passed a prohibition on convict immigration as part of the Immigration Act of 1875. Along with the prohibition of criminals it also forbade the immigration of women “imported for the purposes of prostitution.”42 The 1882 act in a sense only reaffirmed this early prohibition of convicts, but it also provided the means for deportation of any convicted felons who successfully entered the United States. Despite the dire warning about the evils of pauper and convict immigration, the passage of federal legislation was finally secured only because authorities at the main port of entry, Castle Gardens in New York City, literally had threatened to close unless they received federal aid.43 As passed, the Immigration Act of August 1882 provided for a head tax of fifty cents on each alien entering the United States by sea, with the proceeds defraying the costs of regulating immigration and caring for indigent immigrants. Further, it provided for the onboard inspection of all arriving immigrants and prohibited the landing of “any convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” The law also authorized the deportation of immigrant convicts who entered the United States.44 The original bill, which had been submitted by Representative John Van Voorhis on behalf of the New York delegation, included additional provisions that would have made the law’s prohibitions even more stringent. It would, for instance, have further expanded the already highly subjective category of individuals “unable to take care of themselves” without reliance on public support by also denying entry to “any persons who, from any attending circumstances, are likely to become a public charge.” But it came out

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of committee stripped of that broader definition. Proponents of immigration, especially in the western states, worried about granting maritime immigration authorities too much discretion in determining alien admissibility.45 Although principally drafted to provide the financial means for continued state administration of immigration, the Immigration Act of 1882 also introduced basic immigration prohibitions that marked the beginnings of a forty-year effort to limit and reshape immigration to the United States. American perceptions of national self-interest continued to regard open immigration as a benefit, but the new emphasis on the productive capacity and fitness of immigrants suggested the outlines of future debates on immigrants as a drain on social services. The inclusion of the mentally unfit as a specific category of restriction in the 1882 Immigration Act not only empowered immigration authorities to judge the mental fitness of arriving immigrants but also explicitly established health conditions as a basis for exclusion. In subsequent years, legislators would expand in important ways health-based immigration prohibitions. A half-dozen years before Emma Lazarus’s immortal words of welcome were engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, American lawmakers showed doubts about the wisdom of offering too wide a welcome to the “poor” and “wretched refuse” of Europe. How to effectively enforce the subjective prohibitions enacted would remain problematic for decades, but the 1882 passage of a general prohibition against pauper and convict immigration marked the beginning of a transformation of American immigration policy.

The Drive to Exclude the Chinese In addition to the broad qualitative restrictions incorporated in the August 1882 head tax legislation, the federal government also imposed more specific prohibitions during the 1880s. Indeed, much of the real energy behind immigration restrictions in the 1880s came from two campaigns, led by workers and their unions, targeting specific immigrant groups. One of the first groups of immigrants to become visible in the 1880s climate of economic stress and growing racial anxiety were the Chinese. In 1850, at the same time that Irish, English, German, and Scandinavian immigrants were entering the United States through Atlantic seaports, Chinese workers began entering the newly acquired American territory of California via San Francisco. Very few Chinese had immigrated to the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. By mid

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century, however, a combination of push and pull factors had created an increasing trans-Pacific flow.46 Chinese emigrants during this period generally took one of two routes out of China: as coolies or as free or indebted emigrants. The former were part of the global trade in unskilled labor that arose in response to the closure of the African slave trade in the regions of European colonization. Beginning in the 1840s, the “coolie trade” began to blossom, with Chinese being transported in increasing numbers to Peru, Cuba, and other destinations in Latin America.47 Many participants in the coolie trade had been tricked by false promises about the terms of their labor, while many others had been kidnapped or otherwise impressed against their will.48 At the same time, a second stream of free or semifree Chinese emigrants booked passage to California and Australia. Emigrants to California were drawn by news of opportunities for wealth in the gold mines, and California came to be known as “Gum Sann,” or gold mountain. By 1850, approximately 3,500 Chinese had entered California, most that same year. By the end of the following year, there were 23,500 Chinese in the state.49 The overwhelming majority of Chinese immigrants during the period of unrestricted immigration (1850–1882) were young or middle-aged men. Either bachelors or married men traveling without their families, these migrants sent a portion of their earnings back to China to assist their families. In general, they came as “sojourners,” working to accumulate capital with the intention of eventually returning to their families in China.50 Most of these migrants were peasants who, unable to pay the costs for their passage, used the ticket-credit system. Through this system a migrant entered an agreement through which he received a high-interest loan to pay for his passage to the United States. Once in the States, he received help finding work and had his wages partially garnished until the loan, with interest, was repaid. The Six Companies, a San Franciscobased conglomerate of wealthy Chinese merchants, organized much of this profitable traffic of Chinese into California and the West from the 1850s on. The credit-ticket system did rely on the discipline and enforcement of the Six Companies, but it was a far cry from the “coolie” system in terms of migrant exploitation.51 Through the 1850s, most of these Chinese men labored in the mining districts of California, either working placer mines or cooking and washing for miners. As opportunities in the mines diminished in the early 1860s, many Chinese found employment in heavy construction. The Central Pacific Railroad employed 10,000 Chinese between 1866 and 1869 for

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work on the transcontinental railroad, some of whom were recruited directly from China and transported via newly established steamship line.52 In the 1870s, many Chinese left California for other mining opportunities in the mountain West. They increasingly accepted agricultural work, expanding the Chinese presence in the Sacramento, San Joaquin, and Santa Clara valleys of California. At the same time, large numbers returned to San Francisco.53 Anglo miners in California, themselves fresh arrivals in the newly acquired territory, met their Chinese counterparts with no little hostility in the 1850s. The presence of Chinese and other foreign-born miners in the gold country had precipitated efforts at exclusion by both legal means and vigilantism. As early as 1849, a group of American miners in Tolumne County called for the expulsion of all Chinese miners from the district. Through the 1850s, Anglo miners throughout the northern and southern mining regions beat, robbed, and sometimes killed Chinese miners. After California’s legislature passed the Foreign Miner’s Tax in 1852, Chinese, Mexican, and Chileno miners found themselves forced to pay a discriminatory tax on their mining activities.54 With the redistribution of the Chinese population in the 1860s, conflict with Anglo-Californians widened. By 1870, Chinese workers constituted between 20 and 25 percent of the state’s wage-earning population.55 At the same time, San Francisco was experiencing unstable economic conditions. The city’s manufacturers had thrived as suppliers to the nearby mining camps and profited from the artificial scarcity caused by the Civil War. They now faced difficult times, and the completion of the railroad link to the eastern seaboard meant more intense competition with eastern manufacturers. In order to cut production costs, manufacturers turned to Chinese workers, whom they could hire at lower wages than their white counterparts.56 White workers in the city, displaying the “race-conscious heritage” of the mining communities, blamed Chinese workers for declining labor market conditions. The fact that the Chinese “were racially and culturally different eased this transposition of job concerns and nativism.”57 Anti-Chinese clubs had begun forming in the 1860s in the midst of episodes of white working-class mob violence against the Chinese. By 1870, pronounced anti-Chinese feelings were evident in the state, although industrialists remained enthusiastic supporters of Chinese immigration.58 The economic depression of 1873–1878 further destabilized California’s economy and increased anti-Chinese sentiments. The rise of the antiChinese, anticapitalist Workingmen’s Party of California in the course

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of the national labor uprising of 1877 “gave political focus to nearly ten years of working-class agitation” against the Chinese. Dennis Kearney’s “sandlot unionism,” with its cries of “The Chinese Must Go!,” led the struggle to construct Chinese workers as threatening “others.” Politicians, newspaper editors, urban reformers, religious leaders, and others joined the effort.59 Ultimately, a mix of economic, racial, and cultural arguments would be invoked against continued Chinese immigration.60 But their construction as a threat rested primarily on a view of Chinese workers as “coolies,” unfree workers or “virtual slaves” working under terms of virtual bondage in the United States. The Chinese immigrants to the United States were, in fact, voluntary immigrants, although many did work under obligation to repay the loans that underwrote their ocean passage. Those restrictionists who acknowledged the voluntary nature of Chinese labor migration nevertheless argued that Chinese workers differed qualitatively from American free laborers. California senator John Miller argued in 1882 that overpopulated conditions in China had created workers who had become, “by long training and heredity . . . automatic engines of flesh and blood . . . with such a marvelous frame and digestive apparatus that they can dispense with the comforts of shelter and subsist on the refuse of other men.”61 In this analysis Chinese workers were neither slaves nor free laborers but subhuman automatons destined to cheapen the lives of white workers through unfair competition.62 Several year earlier, the California Senate had issued a memorial to Congress employing the same line of thought: “We find one-sixth of our entire population composed of Chinese coolies, not involuntary, but, by the unalterable structure of their intellectual being, voluntary slaves.”63 Other anti-Chinese propagandists did not bother to make distinctions between voluntary and involuntary labor migration. A writer in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1849 gave voice to the popular perception of Chinese coolieism: “When the coolie arrives here he is rigidly under the control of the contractor who brought him as ever an African slave was under his master in South Carolina or Louisiana.”64 In the post–Civil War era, such dark images of slavelike working conditions resonated with freelabor advocates, and overt comparisons to African slaves and the American South heightened the sense of alarm.65 In this rhetoric of exclusion, the link to African Americans was key and therefore often explicit. Contemporary white observers frequently compared Chinese to blacks, ascribing to them “racial qualities previously assigned to blacks. . . . Like blacks, the Chinese were described as heathen,

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morally inferior, savage, childlike, and lustful.” In the context of prevalent notions that “races had certain fixed, immutable biological and cultural traits,” such characterizations strengthened the argument for Chinese exclusion.66 By the late 1870s, the legal implications of Chinese racial difference were becoming embedded in the larger culture. In 1878 a federal circuit court judge ruled Chinese ineligible for naturalization.67 The 1880 California Constitution denied Chinese the right to vote, and, in the same year, the state legislature proscribed marriages between whites and Chinese.68 Such legal constructions “reinforced the idea that Chinese were essentially different and racially inferior.”69 Finally, opponents exploited cultural differences between “whites” and Chinese. Anglo observers had scrutinized Chinese foodways, customs, hygiene, amusements, and religious practices, and many considered them inferior. Scientists began to suggest links between the Chinese and dreaded diseases.70 In 1876 a specially appointed committee of the California Senate investigated the state’s Chinese population, issuing a broadly circulated report that focused on the negative “moral effects of continued Chinese presence” in the state. The report paid a great deal of attention to the visible pockets of vice in Chinatown: opium dens, prostitution, gambling, and racketeering.71 At the same time that Chinese culture was being viewed as inferior to that of whites, it was also being characterized as “impregnable.” According to one witness before the state Senate committee hearings, “The Chinese are non-assimilative because their form of civilization has crystallized, so to speak.” Thus, nativists deemed the Chinese both culturally inferior and incapable of adapting to American cultural norms.72 Through the 1870s, much of this agitation had already been translated into the political realm in California. But the emergence of immigration controls as a provenance of the federal government by the late 1870s, coupled with federal court decisions ruling some of California’s antiChinese laws unconstitutional, led to an increasing focus on obtaining a federal ban on Chinese immigration.73 Although relatively few Chinese lived outside the American western states, the anti-Chinese movement received significant support in the East. At the same time, political cartoons, poems, essays, and short stories in newspapers and popular magazines introduced the Chinese to the broader American public.74 Depictions were generally unflattering. That they were having an effect on American opinion can be seen in the fact that both the Democratic and the Republican parties, vying for the western vote in the election of 1880, incorporated anti-Chinese immigration planks into their party platforms.75

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Already by 1875 Congress had responded to complaints about the importation of “Chinese coolies” and Chinese women for prostitution by barring immigration for “lewd or immoral purposes.”76 In 1876 a congressional committee investigating Chinese immigration concluded that the United States ought to pursue restrictions on Chinese immigration through treaty negotiations with the Chinese. The 1868 Burlingame Treaty between the United States and China, which recognized the right of Chinese to migrate freely, stood as an obstacle to any congressional erection of immigration barriers.77 A renegotiated treaty with the Chinese, ratified in 1880, allowed the United States to set limits on Chinese immigrations, and Congress adopted a bill in early 1882 that would have suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers for twenty years. President Chester Arthur vetoed this bill, arguing that the twenty-year period repudiated the spirit of the treaty and would unnecessarily harm U.S.China trade relations, which were of keen interest to American industrial leaders. Months later, Arthur signed a revised version of the bill, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which instituted a ten-year suspension on the immigration of Chinese laborers.78 In addition to instituting the ban on continued immigration of Chinese workers, the law provided for the deportation of “any Chinese person found unlawfully within the United States” and excluded Chinese residents from American citizenship.79 The law exempted merchants, teachers, students, and travelers, and made provisions for the right of Chinese residents to exit and return to the United States.80 But the exemption of Chinese merchants emerged as a useful loophole in the laws, and litigation by Chinese immigrants in the 1880s encountered a sympathetic federal bench.81 In response, Congress tightened the law’s restrictions in 1884 and again in 1888, when it revoked the right of legally resident Chinese workers to leave and reenter the United States.82 Congress would continue to tinker with and extend the Chinese exclusion laws in the coming decades, but by 1888 opponents of the Chinese had succeeded in establishing one of the initial barriers to American immigration.

The Ban on Contract Labor At about the same time that opponents of Chinese immigration marshaled these economic, racial, and cultural arguments to justify exclusion of Chinese, leaders of the nascent American labor union movement employed ideas about unfree labor to press Congress to bar the immigration of workers under contract. These two movements, as historian Gwen

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dolyn Mink has argued, were related. Eastern trade union leaders who emerged in the early 1880s to lead the successful fight for a federal anticontract labor law employed the same critique that California’s working class had used against Chinese immigrant workers. Both groups argued that the scourges of American workers—unemployment and low wages— stemmed from the entry of “unfree” foreign workers into the labor force. Just as opponents of Chinese immigration ignored the realities of Chinese immigration and constructed the Chinese as unfree “coolie” labor, so opponents of “contract labor” immigrants in the East and Midwest imagined hordes of “servile” contract workers among the new arrivals from Hungary and Italy. And in both instances, a transposition of “anticapitalist feeling with anti-immigrant hostility” rested on racialized constructions of the immigrant threat.83 That contract labor would become the paramount concern of the emerging Knights of Labor and the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (forerunner of the American Federation of Labor) in the early 1880s suggests that its use by industry was widespread. But historians have found little evidence that it was.84 Corporations in the 1860s and 1870s had, in fact, used immigrant workers to control labor costs and defeat union-organizing efforts. But the practice of signing labor contracts with workers overseas was actually far less common than American workers and other observers came to believe. Instead, corporations relied on private labor bureaus in the United States to provide them with workers. Such agencies recruited workers as they disembarked at American ports of entry. One New York labor agency in the 1870s claimed access to 20,000 workers. Labor bureaus in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere furnished workers to railroad and construction projects in the western states as well as to coal operators, frequently at wages below the going scale for a region. Immigrant labor bureaus frequently provided the workers that enabled employers to disrupt labor-organizing efforts in the mining and railroad industries during this period.85 In the 1870s climate of increasing labor-capital conflict and intensifying worker distrust of capital, many workers resented—and sometimes misunderstood—these capitalist manipulations of the labor market. Native workers and union leaders charged that employers intentionally imported immigrant workers under contract to serve as strike breakers. For instance, much of the anti-contract labor sentiment that emerged in the early 1880s originated in the anthracite coal-mining region of Pennsylvania. In that “industrial hell” of the Northeast, “militant antiforeign sentiment” consumed the native working class as coal operators

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introduced Italian, Polish, and Hungarian laborers to combat unionization efforts. Although few of these European-born workers had actually been brought from Europe under contract to work in the mines, they were branded as such nonetheless by workers and their emerging voice, the Knights of Labor. In part this perception no doubt emerged from the manner in which strikebreakers entered the mines. Transported “en masse . . . under guard surrounded by employers’ men and police contingents hired for the occasion,” strikebreaking workers “understandably appeared” to be “of a captive status—owned, transported, and guarded by capital.” In any case, believing that strikebreaking immigrant workers were contract laborers imported by capitalists, strikers and their leaders provided themselves with the basis for optimism, a hope that their problems might be remedied.86 The best-publicized and best-documented case of contracted labor procurement arose in the window-glass industry, which had expanded from the eastern seaboard into parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Through the 1860s and 1870s, window-glass manufacturers, particularly those in the Midwest facing higher labor costs, had repeatedly hired contract skilled glassblowers from Germany, Great Britain, Belgium, and France. In 1879, window-glass workers in Pittsburgh, believing that the hiring of contract workers from overseas depressed the wages of U.S. workers and retarded their advancement in the craft, formed Local 300 of the Knights of Labor. The success of the local in its 1883 strike of East Coast manufacturers created the initial momentum for the anti-contract labor law introduced into Congress in 1884.87 At the urging of both the Knights of Labor and the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, several anti-contract labor bills were submitted to the Forty-eighth Congress. The act submitted by Martin Foran, an Ohio Democrat, proceeded furthest, and the union leaders leading the legislative battle for the Foran Act in 1884 were asked repeatedly for anecdotal evidence to support the legislation. Yet they proffered little. Indeed, the only factual evidence that labor backers submitted about the use of contract laborers came from the window-glass workers. A delegation of officers from that union testified before the House Committee on Labor in 1884. They brought along not only “certified copies of actual contracts but also . . . glassworkers who had come [to the United States] as contract laborers.” Other testimony before the committee was of a far more general nature; most related to the employer practice of hiring workers through New York labor bureaus. Of the numerous petitions sent to Congress that year asking for anti-contract labor legislation, none offered documenta

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tion of the practice of overseas labor contracting.88 Despite the dearth of evidence regarding extensive employer use of contract workers, the Foran Act received little opposition. Manufacturing and railroad interests do not seem to have been overly concerned about it.89 Indeed, in many regards the Foran Act appears to have been an almost symbolic assault on labor immigration in general, reflecting the first stage of organized labor’s anxiety about large-scale immigration in the rapidly industrializing economy.90 Those fears, perhaps fanned by the industrial depression of 1883–1886, made the bill a “rallying point for anti-immigration forces.”91 Interestingly, floor debate of the measure in the House of Representatives did not even turn on the matter of how extensive a problem contract labor was but on the evils of unfree “servile” labor and on the supposed social, physical, and moral characteristics of the new groups of immigrants—Italians, Hungarians, Greeks, Chinese— associated with contract labor status. Distinctions between voluntary immigrants and contract workers were somewhat obscure—or deemed irrelevant—in the debate of the Foran Act.92 Representative Foran set the tone for debate by introducing the bill as an attempt to prevent capitalists from shipping in, “as so many cattle, large numbers of degraded, ignorant, brutal Italian and Hungarian laborers.” Rather than addressing at any length the process of overseas labor contracting, Foran provided the House with the results of his inquiry into the “habits, customs, modes of living, and moral and social conditions” of the Hungarian workers against whom he imagined his bill would work. After characterizing these new immigrants as of low intelligence and deplorable personal living habits, he warned of the dangers of their “intermarriage” into American “blooded stock.”93 The bill, drafted by craft unionists to prevent American firms from hiring skilled workers overseas, had been sold “in terms of the harmful effects of ‘pauper,’ ‘servile,’ unskilled labor” and with an “appeal to racist sentiment.” As they had for opponents of Chinese “coolieism” three years earlier, these appeals for the defense of free labor remained politically compelling. In 1884 both major parties had condemned contract labor in their party platforms, the Republicans being “particularly careful to remind voters that they traditionally opposed all forms of ‘servile labor.’”94 Coupled as they were with suggestions that the servility of the new classes of workers might stem from their ethnic and racial difference, arguments for barring contracted immigrant workers met the mood of the hour. In addition to being politically appealing, the legislation may have also seemed a safe and easy vote to many congressmen precisely because it

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was toothless. Many of those voting in support of the bill recognized that the law did not address the heart of the problem; early amendments had clarified that only contracts signed overseas would be banned, ensuring that the popular route of using U.S. labor agencies could continue. At the same time, the law had absolutely no enforcement provisions. In any case, the Foran Act passed the House easily in June 1884, and the Senate followed suit the following February.95 As passed, the bill prohibited any individual or group from prepaying the transportation, or otherwise assisting, the migration of aliens under contract to work in the United States.96 The issue of contract workers, then, was something of a red herring for the labor movement. Although it affected only a limited number of skilled workers, craft union leaders made it a high-profile crusade. For the unskilled workers in the mining industry, around whom much of the agitation for the contract labor law revolved, it would provide no relief from the patterns of immigrant labor use in the region, which had generally not involved contract labor. But the imagined scourge of contract labor would continue to occupy the agenda of the AFL through the 1880s and beyond.97 Throughout the 1880s, as John Higham has argued, labor leaders maintained a careful distinction between voluntary labor migration and immigration induced or controlled by capitalists. The presence of foreign-born union members as well as an “internationalist spirit” made such distinctions necessary. But organized labor’s hostility to immigration would expand in the coming decades as it became obvious that contract labor arrangements were not to blame for the surge of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.98 While the campaign against contract labor might appear in hindsight to have been ill-conceived, it was nonetheless quite significant. It represented American organized labor’s first effort to address the profound labor market anxieties produced by American open immigration policies in the emerging world-capitalist system. The rhetorical outpouring on behalf of American workers shaped popular understanding of a key function of immigration restrictions as they developed over time: protecting American workers. More interesting than the fact that pursuit of a contract labor prohibition was misguided was the fact that it generated such passion from the ranks of labor and that, in the hands of some leaders, it became a vehicle for anti-immigrant sentiments, tinged with ethnic and racial fears. Following on the heels of bans on pauper immigration and Chinese immigration, passage of the contract labor prohibition completed the remarkably intense opening of restrictive legislation.

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By the mid-1880s, then, anti-immigrant passions had been converted into restrictive legislation. The United States had begun to draw distinctions among the immigrants arriving on its shores, barring the migration of paupers, convicts, the mentally infirm, Chinese workers, and workers under contract. As experiments in the ongoing American project to define its identify—what it should and should not be—immigration restrictions on these groups naturally heightened U.S. concern with defining and defending its borders. In drawing these first intellectual boundaries precluding some from entry into the American community, national authorities unwittingly altered the meanings of the nation’s physical boundaries as well. Through the 1880s, national concerns regarding the borders with Canada and Mexico had, for the most part, been the province of diplomats, military leaders, and custom officials in the Department of the Treasury. But the immigration restrictions of the 1880s ultimately would position the physical borders of the nation at the heart of a vital domestic concern. And the vastness of the nation’s physical borders with Canada and Mexico, coupled with the tenacity and ingenuity of many barred migrants, would make enforcement of immigration restrictions at the borders a Sisyphean task with far-reaching consequences for the border regions and the nation as a whole. But the immigration restrictions passed in the 1880s did more than plant the seed for a system of border administration. They also fundamentally shaped the contours of that administration. For embedded within the new restrictions were fundamental contradictions in the political economy of industrializing America. Balancing the oft-expressed fears of the social costs of the “immigrant flood” were voices touting the immense economic value of the immigrant labor supply. Already in the restrictions enacted in the 1880s could be seen the emerging divisions between those who saw immigrants as drains on social resources or unfair competitors in the labor market and those who saw immigrants as vital resources for the industrial economy. These competing visions would lead, through the 1890s and beyond, to conflicting interpretations of the proper administration of immigration laws at maritime and land ports of entry. At the same time, the 1880s’ restrictions also contained embedded ideas about race, class, and ethnicity that would shape the emerging regime of border administration in important ways. By placing racial markers at the center of the law’s enforcement, the Chinese Exclusion Act ultimately racialized the national borders and shaped the practice and culture of undocumented immigration and immigration law enforcement. Similarly, because the Immigration Act of 1882 principally targeted poor

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and working-class migrants, class distinctions would also become central to the work of immigration inspectors. The full implications of these provisions of law would not be evident in the Mexican borderland region until after the establishment of a border control apparatus on the Mexican border in the 1890s. In the short term, the new laws were destined to create demand for that apparatus by inadvertently leading migrants to adopt routes crossing the northern and southern borders of the United States.



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Di verted Streams: Discover i ng a Permeable Border, 1 882–189 1

Chapter 2

There is no part of [the Canadian border] over which a Chinaman may not pass into our country without fear of hindrance; there are scarcely any parts of it where he may not walk boldly across it at high noon. Julian Ralph, “The Chinese Leak,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, March 1891

Eleven months after passage of the 1882 Immigration Act that barred pauper immigration into the United States, the New York Times reported that twenty-eight immigrants fresh from Ireland had been found “helpless and starving” in the streets of Buffalo, New York. According to the article, the immigrants had crossed into the United States from Canada, where a “large number” of impoverished immigrants from Ireland were purportedly landing at the ports of Quebec and Montreal with plans to enter the United States. Many of the immigrants were “almost destitute, having neither money nor friends, and . . . too feeble, by reason of age or infirmity, to support themselves.” Federal authorities maintained that they were being shipped to the United States through Canada with the assistance of government authorities in Ireland.1 A month later and a few thousands miles west along the U.S.-Canadian border, American customs authorities in Washington Territory discovered Chinese workers immigrating across the international border as well. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had stimulated an active smuggling trade across the waters of Puget Sound, and in August 1883 the Tacoma, Washington, collector of customs reported that nearly 100 Chinese immigrants had illicitly entered the United States from Canada within a matter of a few days.2 In both Buffalo and Seattle and at various points elsewhere along the Canadian and Mexican borders in the 1880s, American authorities confronted new transborder immigration streams stimulated by enforcement of immigration restrictions at maritime ports of entry. After 1882, migrants subject to exclusion from the United States, principally Chinese

workers but also those who might be judged paupers, began to make use of the extensive land borders that joined the United States to its northern and southern neighbors. Their successful efforts to slip into the United States in a roundabout fashion demonstrated to American officials that enforcement of the immigration restrictions was going to prove far more difficult, resource intensive, and frustrating than initially imagined. Indeed, one of the more significant, if somewhat hidden, legacies of the early restrictive acts was the redirection of excludable immigrants to the contiguous land borders with Mexico and Canada. By the late 1880s, tens of thousands of aspiring immigrants subject to American restrictions had begun skirting federal inspection by entering the United States across the Canadian and Mexican borders. This chapter considers the first decade of experiences with enforcement of national immigration restrictions, in particular how these new laws stimulated smuggling and illicit entry on the Mexican and Canadian borders, the nature of that undocumented entry, and the first efforts to police border crossing. At least three distinct patterns of transborder migration by excludable aliens developed in the 1880s. First, a fair number of European emigrants excludable under the provisions of the general 1882 Immigration Act entered the United States by way of the Canadian border between Maine and Michigan. The Canadian route into the United States had been used for decades, principally by British subjects, but increasingly after 1882 it became the preferred route for British migrants liable to be judged public charges. Second, Chinese laborers in search of work on the West Coast defied the Chinese Exclusion Act by slipping into the United States across the Canadian border, principally through British Columbia. A third pattern, which developed after the tightening of the provisions of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1888, brought Chinese into the Southwest through the Mexican states of Baja California and Sonora. Not only did these border-crossing activities in the 1880s lead directly to the establishment of a federal border control regime in the United States after 1891, they also revealed the inherent difficulties of enforcing immigration law at the border. In their efforts to cross the border immigrants and smugglers relied on sometimes ingenious methods of deception and disguise and exploited the advantages to be found in the physical and cultural landscapes of the northern and southern borders. Customs authorities charged with enforcing immigration laws along the borders discovered the disadvantages to which the border environment subjected them even as they developed strategies and methods that allowed them to begin to counter efforts at undocumented entry. Taken together, these

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1880s developments on the border would lead restrictionists and policymakers to recognize by 1891 that the Canadian and Mexican borders posed unique “immigration problems” requiring the establishment of federal migration controls on American land borders.

Evading the New Restrictions The difficulty that U.S. land borders posed in the administration of federal immigration laws in the 1880s was only a relatively small part of the much larger problem of enforcement generally. For the most part, evasion of the various immigration prohibitions in the 1880s occurred at the maritime ports of entry, not on the land borders. From the start, the lack of sufficient and well-coordinated enforcement mechanisms limited the effectiveness of all three restrictive acts. For instance, the Immigration Act of August 1882 barring pauper immigration had established federal authority over immigration inspection but had left administration to be accomplished by state authorities. Through the 1880s state understaffing of immigrant inspection forces undermined efforts to conduct meaningful inspections of arriving immigrants.3 In 1889, New York’s Castle Garden immigration station employed only two immigration inspectors to inspect the 6,000 or so immigrants arriving on an average day.4 Inspections of individual migrants there were “necessarily done in a very hurried manner,” according to one observer, and the resulting pace of immigrant traffic through the port made the inspection process a “perfect farce.”5 Critics of the immigrant inspection process in Massachusetts suggested that understaffing and lax inspections at the Port of Boston accounted for the fact that inspectors had denied entry to only 107 out of 47,062 immigrants landing between June 1887 and June 1888.6 Enforcement of the Foran Act’s contract labor prohibition was similarly weak through the 1880s and beyond. Almost immediately after passage of the Foran Act in 1885, American Federation of Labor (AFL) leaders began to address the glaring problem of creating the means for the law’s enforcement. In 1887, Congress finally instructed the secretary of the treasury to make arrangements with state authorities for inspections and provided the authority for the deportation of contract laborers attempting to enter the country. Prior to that, “no immigrants nor employers were ever even questioned with regard to contract labor.”7 Even after enforcement of the law fell to customs officials, few customs collectors embraced the added responsibility enthusiastically. One customs district director reported to congressional investigators in 1890 that his “inspectors

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are particularly instructed to look after the irregularities in the customs service, and the alien contract labor law is only incidental. . . . We can only pay but little attention to it, and this is when cases are brought to our attention.”8 And even at those maritime ports such as Castle Garden where specially appointed contract labor inspectors did the work, authorities found the law maddeningly difficult to enforce. In ascertaining whether or not an immigrant had illegally come to the United States to fulfill a labor contract, inspectors essentially had little more than the immigrant’s own statements. Thus, immigrants coached in advance about how to answer inspectors’ questions easily concealed contractual arrangements. In the first fourteen years of enforcement of the contract labor law, no more than 8,000 out of six million immigrants were denied entry as contract laborers.9 The Chinese Exclusion Act proved by far the most vexing of the three new restrictive laws in terms of enforcement. But those difficulties arose less from insufficient means of enforcement than from the fact that a great many barred Chinese workers successfully used legal means to contest their exclusion. Administration of the Chinese Exclusion Act also fell to the Treasury Department, which designated collectors of custom at American ports to handle inspections of arriving Chinese.10 San Francisco continued to receive the bulk of new Chinese immigrants through the 1880s, and a well-developed inspection staff conducted Chinese inspections there. But in the opening years of the law’s enforcement, proponents of Chinese exclusion were disappointed to see that a fair number of Chinese immigrants of all classes continued to be admitted annually at American ports, principally at San Francisco. The exclusion act had permitted the admission of merchants, students, and travelers from China. It also allowed Chinese workers already in the United States in 1882 to remain as residents, and these Chinese workers retained the right to exit the United States and return, provided they had obtained certificates of identity from customs inspectors before departing. Through the 1880s, anti-Chinese restrictionists repeatedly complained that ordinary Chinese laborers fraudulently made use of these loopholes to enter the United States. The San Francisco collector of customs, a political appointee sensitive to local pressures, adopted a very strict interpretation of the act, particularly with regard to the evidentiary requirements for demonstrating that one had an exempt merchant status. Many Chinese immigrants denied admission by custom authorities successfully appealed the decision in fed-



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eral court. Habeus corpus petitions filed by debarred Chinese immigrants in these and other cases frequently received sympathetic hearings before federal judges. As a result, the federal district court in San Francisco came to play a significant role in administration of the Chinese Exclusion Act.11 In the first fourteen months of the act’s enforcement, federal judges had a hand in the landing of almost a third of all Chinese immigrants in San Francisco.12 After an 1884 amendment tightened some of the act’s provisions for entry as merchants, significant numbers of Chinese immigrants arriving at San Francisco continued to press for admission as former residents entitled to return. Hundreds arriving without the requisite certificates of identity demonstrating their prior residence claimed to have left the United States in the brief period of time before the customs collector had begun issuing the certificates of identity required by statute.13 By 1888, habeus corpus cases involving such claims represented three-fourths of all such petitions filed by Chinese before the San Francisco federal bench.14 The extent to which such cases showed that Chinese immigrants were attempting to enter the United States fraudulently was no doubt greatly exaggerated by restrictionists at the time.15 But opponents of Chinese immigration pointed to continued immigration as proof of ineffectual enforcement of the exclusion act, and “exclusion fever” again grew in the mid-1880s. Anti-Chinese violence throughout the West peaked in 1885–1886, and Congress reacted again to political pressure by amending the exclusion act again in 1888. In order to counter fraudulent claims of prior residence in the United States, the Scott Act of 1888 explicitly repealed the earlier provision allowing resident Chinese workers to leave the United States and return. As a result, all Chinese workers who had left the United States with certificates of identity in hand were no longer to be readmitted to the United States.16 Through the 1880s, then, immigration authorities wrestled with a thousand problems of administering new federal immigration laws. In the main, efforts to address problems of administration of the immigration laws focused on the traditional maritime ports—New York, Boston, and San Francisco—where the majority of immigrants landed. But at the same time, many excludable aliens also began pioneering immigration routes that took them around seaport inspection points altogether. Although riddled with problems of administration, the new federal immigration laws were in fact turning back many potential immigrants at American seaports. And determined immigrants who either had been or feared being denied entrance at seaports increasingly opted to enter the United



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States across its unmanned land borders. A close look at three patterns that developed in the 1880s affords a glimpse of the origins of undocumented immigration into the United States.

The Canadian Passage, Part I One of the first post-1882 transborder migration patterns of note is that of excludable British subjects across the Canadian border into Maine, upstate New York, and Vermont. The passage of British and Irish immigrants into the United States via Canada in the 1880s was one of the most important factors in the creation of a federal immigration presence on American land borders. Although pauper immigrants who entered the United States across the land border technically did not violate U.S. immigration law, they essentially circumvented it in a way that forced Congress to apply immigration law to the nation’s land borders as well. Prior to the passage of the 1882 act barring pauper immigration, the only borders of concern to restrictionists and immigration authorities were the maritime ports of the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards, through which large numbers of European and Asian immigrants had traditionally entered the United States. The Canadian and Mexican borders had not been deemed especially important as points of entry of immigrants. At the time of the passage of the various restrictions in the early 1880s, the contiguous land border with Mexico was not a site of significant transnational immigration. Northern Mexico remained sparsely populated, and no railroad links yet existed to carry potential immigrants from that country’s interior or seaports to the border with the United States. Immigration from Canada, on the other hand, was not insignificant. Over 800,000 Canadians, both French- and English-speaking, had migrated to New England and the Midwest in the 1860s and 1870s.17 But even this cross-border traffic paled in comparison with the volume of immigrants arriving by sea, and early efforts to reform American immigration policy focused as a matter of procedure on arrivals at maritime ports. Certainly the fact that two of the key restriction laws passed in the 1880s—the Foran Act and the Chinese Exclusion Act—targeted immigrant groups that typically arrived by sea helped keep the focus on maritime ports of entry. Partly as a result of these perceptions, the general Immigration Act of 1882 contained no provision for immigration across land borders. Rather, its head tax and inspection provisions applied only to passengers “not a citizen of the United States who shall come by steam or sail vessel from

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a foreign port to any port within the United States.”18 On its surface, it seems a curious exemption for Congress to create, especially since the bill’s proponents did recognize that impoverished immigrants from Great Britain routinely entered the United States by way of Canada.19 In fact, the bill as originally proposed by Representative Van Voorhis of New York did not specify “steam or sail” vessels, and it probably would have mandated immigrant inspections at ports of entry on the Mexican and Canadian land borders. Further, the original bill had attempted to deal with cross-border migration of paupers by providing for the deportation to the country of origin of all immigrants who became public charges.20 But both of these provisions were deleted from the bill before its passage. The reasons why the bill was amended to exclude entry through land borders from inspection is not entirely clear, although there is evidence to suggest that pressure from Canadian railroads, which carried many immigrants to the border, lay behind this amendment.21 At the same time, members of the House Commerce Committee considering Van Voorhis’s bill interpreted the pauper deportation provision as a generous sop for steamship companies that would reimburse them, at public expense, for the return voyage of the very same paupers they had brought to the United States. (In fact, paupers transported by steamships would have been forbidden to land and would have been subject to immediate return voyage at the steamship’s expense.) As a result, the committee removed the bill’s provisions for the deportation of paupers and the mentally infirm. But it did not then provide any alternative remedy for the problem of cross-border migration of paupers. As a result of its journey through Congress, then, Van Voorhis’s bill did not impose restrictions on immigration across the Mexican and Canadian borders.22 Under that exemption, migrants could continue to cross legally into the United States from Canada or Mexico without paying a head tax or being subject to inspection. That loophole in the 1882 act would create problems throughout the coming decade. It is impossible to know precisely how many impoverished immigrants in the 1880s used this Canadian “back door” into the United States, but contemporary observers considered it significant. The vast majority of European immigrants who entered the United States by way of Canada during the 1880s were British subjects, principally Irish and English. How many of them might have been deemed excludable as pauper aliens under American seaport inspection standards is also a matter of conjecture. It is likely, given the continued British practice of assisting the poorer sort to emigrate to Canada after 1882, that many of the immigrants who entered the United States by way of Canada would have been deemed paupers

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by inspectors at an American seaport. The Treasury Department official who reported the discovery of twenty-eight Irish paupers in Buffalo in July 1883 claimed that a large number of state-aided immigrants were set to leave County Limerick, Ireland, bound for the United States via Canada.23 According to the secretary of the New York State Board of Charities, upward of 800 assisted Irish immigrants had flooded across the Canadian border into New York in 1882 and 1883. Similar reports from Treasury Department agents and state charity officials led President Chester Arthur to warn Congress in December 1883 of the problem of “needy emigrants reaching our territory through Canada.”24 How the Treasury Department agent might have been privy to a British plan to import paupers across the Canadian border remains unclear, but state charity officials in American border states often repeated the charge that British authorities conspired to send excludable immigrants into the United States through Canada. Testifying before the House Select Committee on Foreign Immigration in 1888, state emigration commissioners and poor-relief officials from Michigan, Massachusetts, and New York complained of heavy foreign-born charity loads, which they blamed in part on assisted emigration across the border from Canada. In 1888, Charles Hoyt, secretary of the New York State Board of Charities, told the committee that the British regularly “exported pauper children” to Canada with the expectation that they would “find their way” into the United States.25 S. C. Wrightington, an official from the Massachusetts State Board of Lunacy and Charity, similarly believed that British authorities conspired to stimulate transborder emigration. Pauper immigrants arriving from England via Canada, he told the committee, “have been a class that the authorities on the other side were satisfied they could land at no port in the United States, and they sent them to the United States [via Canada] for that reason.”26 The 1889 annual report of the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury left aside the issue of Anglo-Canadian conspiracies but noted the “facility with which prohibited persons may enter the United States from the British provinces.” Between November 1888 and April 1889, the secretary reported, “twenty-eight British steamships had landed 1,304 immigrants at Portland, Me., but they previously touched at Halifax, and landed more than three times that number, most of whom, it is reported, came by rail through Canada into the United States without examination or restriction.”27 Whether or not we accept the claims that British and Canadian authorities sometimes exploited the open border to send impoverished mi-



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grants into the United States, it is evident that substantial numbers of British subjects, some of them potentially excludable under immigration law, were entering the United States along the eastern border of Canada through the 1880s. To a lesser extent, other European immigrants also appear to have made use of the Canadian route. The experience of a group of enterprising emigrants who steamed to the United States in August 1885 aboard the steamship Château Leoville is illustrative. According to a brief report in the New York Times, immigration inspectors at the Castle Garden inspection station in New York had denied admission to the group—a “party of about 60 Arab gypsies”—on the basis that they were deemed paupers and, thus, excludable aliens. Rather than being “returned to the country whence they came,” however, the group arranged to have themselves landed in Canada, probably at Halifax. New York immigration authorities subsequently learned that this same debarred group of immigrants had crossed the Canadian border line at Vermont and made their way south, presumably headed for New York.28 In the spring of 1891 Treasury Department officials reported, with characteristic imprecision, that “thousands of immigrants from Europe” had entered the United States through Canada in the month of April alone. A single steamship had landed 535 Italians at Halifax, Nova Scotia, that month, and most of the arrivals had, it was claimed, subsequently entered the United States.29 It is unclear why so many Italian immigrants would have taken such a roundabout route into the United States. Perhaps the steamship fare was significantly cheaper. More likely many had been led to believe by the steamship agents, perhaps baselessly, that they stood a chance of being rejected at Ellis Island by reason of infirmity or poverty. Whatever the case, it is clear that some emigrants in the 1880s began to regard the Canadian border as an unguarded back door into the United States. If impoverished immigrants who feared being—or had been—debarred at American ports sometimes adopted the Canadian routes, we can little doubt that other aliens excludable under the 1882 general act sometimes chose the Canadian route as their path to the United States.30 Families seeking to migrate to the United States with mentally infirm family members certainly stood the risk of having that family member excluded as a “lunatic” or “idiot,” and officials from asylums in the United States testified that such transborder migration did occur.31 For instance, a relief official from the Detroit Board of Poor Commissioners complained in 1889 of having “more poor insane [immigrants] . . . thrust upon our hands” in the past several years, “a great many . . . from Canadian ports.”32



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Because we cannot measure the number of immigrants who crossed the Canadian border during this period of unchecked border migration or estimate the number of such migrants who might have been deemed excludable, we cannot with any precision measure the impact of the 1882 exclusion act on cross-border traffic. Did maritime port inspections divert some potentially excludable immigrants to pass themselves across the Canadian border? The conjectures of state charity officials that pauper immigration had increased along the border after 1882 seem to have persuaded lawmakers, one of whom concluded that the lack of inspection at the Canadian border acted as “an inducement to the pauper and the criminal to come and land in Canada and then cross the line.”33 Treasury Department officials themselves had recognized the problem at an early stage, arguing that the porous border undermined the effectiveness of seaboard inspections. In a March 1886 letter to Congress, acting secretary of the treasury C. S. Fairchild complained that “while the existing law attempts to provide against the landing of aliens, when paupers, insane, or idiotic, at maritime ports, it makes no provision against the introduction of these classes from contiguous foreign territory.” Accompanying the letter was a draft of a bill to amend the 1882 act by providing for the deportation of such immigrants. Interestingly, the Treasury Department had not yet concluded that provision for border inspections was necessary.34 Both the House committee investigating immigration in 1888 and the joint House-Senate committee conducting an investigation two years later scrutinized the customs operations in place on the border. Customs officials were neither authorized nor trained to conduct immigration inspections at border ports of entry, but congressional investigators were nevertheless aghast at their lack of vigilance in regard to pauper immigration. A. C. Tillman, the special deputy customs collector of Detroit, answered questions before the joint committee in June 1890. After admitting that customs inspectors only concerned themselves with the goods that people carried across the border, Tillman endured a long cross-examination from committee members: Q. So far as your port is concerned, then, any number of immigrants can come here, provided they say nothing and submit to your customs inspection and pay the duty; you never detect the man as an immigrant unless he comes up and says he wants to claim the privilege you have referred to? A. So far as I know; yes sir. . . . Q. For instance, a man would come across the border here who had

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the appearance of a man who was not able to take care of himself, by his personal appearance, and had no baggage with him, could he come right through, or would he be stopped? A. If the customs officer had reason to believe he was coming here to stay, he would be stopped. Q. Well, suppose he was coming here to stay or not, doesn’t the inspection occur as the people walk through when the ferry-boat lands here? A. Yes, sir. Q. If a man does not carry anything in his hand he is not stopped? A. No, sir. Q. And a pauper could come in here, and many of them do, no doubt? A. Yes, sir. Q. And become a public charge upon this community in violation of the law, because there is no one there to detect him? A. You see we do the best we can with the force we have.

One of the congressmen summed up the irony of the situation by noting that “the very fact that [the pauper] has nothing is the very fact that lets him through” inspection at the U.S. border.35 Their efforts to document practices on the border led the committees to reach similar conclusions. The Ford Committee, in its January 1889 report, highlighted the open Canadian border as a significant aspect of a larger immigration problem, complaining that “alien paupers, insane persons, etc., may land at Quebec and at once proceed to this country without any let or hindrance. The number of persons not lawfully entitled to land in the United States who thus arrive in this country by way of the Canadian frontier is rapidly assuming large proportions, and has become a matter of serious contemplation.”36 The committee estimated that 50,000 immigrants had traversed the Canadian border into the United States in the first six months of 1888, “many of whom [were] paupers, idiots, and insane persons . . . not lawfully entitled to land.”37 The January 1891 report of the joint committee repeated the charge that 50,000 European immigrants had come by way of Canada in the past six months. House members of the joint committee proposed remedial legislation along the lines suggested by the Treasury Department five years earlier, providing for deportation of excludable aliens found within the United States.

The Canadian Passage, Part II Just as the prohibition of pauper immigration diverted part of the immigrant stream to a course through Canada, so the 1882 Chinese Exclusion

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Act channeled part of the Chinese immigration stream toward Canada. At the same time that these excludable European emigrants were discovering Canadian routes into the United States, excluded Chinese laborers in the 1880s pioneered alternative migration routes through Canada that permitted them entry into the United States. But while the ease with which unwanted European immigrants came through Canada would suggest to many Americans that the United States needed to establish ports of entry and patrols on its borders, the ease with which Chinese immigrants crossed the border, despite the presence of customs checkpoints and patrols, suggested something altogether different: the inherent difficulties in effectively policing so vast a border. The illicit passage of Chinese immigrants across the Canadian border in the 1880s marked the beginning of what can properly be called undocumented entry, or “illegal immigration,” into the United States. European emigrants entering the United States through Canada may have been contravening the purposes of American immigration laws, but their actions were not technically illegal. Chinese immigrants, on the other hand, were always subject to inspection before entry into the United States, regardless of means of entry (i.e., by land or water). Unlike those of European emigrants, the uninspected border crossings of Chinese explicitly violated the law. That an illicit cross-border traffic in Chinese laborers would develop on the Washington Territory–British Columbia frontier is unsurprising. Chinese had lived and worked in British Columbia since at least 1858, when Chinese from California and China joined the thousands of miners entering the region during the Fraser River gold rush.38 Chinese workers continued to migrate to Canada for decades after the U.S. policy of exclusion had been put in place. The population of Chinese in British Columbia swelled in the early 1880s when recruitment of Chinese labor for construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway brought an additional 15,000 Chinese from the United States and China.39 After the 1882 passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, most Chinese workers could no longer legally cross the Canadian border into the United States. Chinese immigrants intent on crossing into Washington Territory in the 1880s therefore began to do so surreptitiously. The Chinese Exclusion Act had placed authority for enforcement of the law under the collectors of customs at each American port of entry, and an inspection force was put in place in Washington Territory to enforce its provisions on the boundary.40 With that customs inspection force in place in Washington Territory, Chinese workers seeking opportunities in the United States were compelled to invent ways to

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smuggle themselves across. Their methods and the ways in which they availed themselves of advantages in the physical and cultural geography of the Canadian borderlands foreshadowed developments on the Mexican border. According to contemporary accounts, smuggling followed close on the heels of exclusion. As they are in the present day, reliable estimates of the volume of undocumented border crossings were impossible to obtain. Estimates through the 1880s varied widely. Some observers believed the problem remained relatively minor compared to the continued entry of Chinese laborers via San Francisco; others provided figures suggesting that the annual volume could reach the tens of thousands. In August 1883 the Tacoma, Washington, collector of customs reported that nearly 100 Chinese immigrants had successfully entered the United States from Canada within a matter of a few days.41 Two months later a report from San Francisco warned that it was “a fact well known to the residents of British Columbia that at the present time Chinamen are crossing the [United States] border in batches of 20 or 30” by means of Puget Sound.42 If newspaper dispatches from Seattle and Victoria can be believed, Chinese smuggling had become a “thriving business” there by October 1883. American sawmills on Puget Sound reportedly employed large numbers of Chinese, stimulating the traffic.43 Most of the reports of Chinese smuggling efforts in the 1880s came from West Coast newspapers, most of which were fierce proponents of Chinese exclusion laws. Articles often cited high volumes of illegal traffic even as they rarely provided official sources for their information. As Lucy Salyer has pointed out, the anti-Chinese climate in the 1880s West and the political use to which it could be put no doubt led to exaggerated claims of the “problem” of Chinese immigration. For that reason, contemporary newspaper reports of extensive smuggling networks and high smuggling volumes ought to be regarded somewhat skeptically. But a fair amount of smuggling, without a doubt, went on. One border official testifying to a congressional committee in 1890 placed the figure at 2,500 annually, although an investigative article published on the subject the following year suggested that only 1,500 Chinese entered by way of Canada each year.44 While we may never know the exact or even approximate volume of Chinese smuggling on the Canadian border during the 1880s, it was sufficiently visible to draw congressional attention to the matter. Two patterns of smuggling prevailed along the border during the 1880s. The first involved carrying Chinese workers by boat across the span of water separating Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and U.S. terri

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tory. Typically, smugglers were Canadian or American men who operated out of the city of Victoria on Vancouver Island, traveled at night, and charged anywhere between $25 and $50 per person for each Chinese migrant carried. Using small sailboats and steamboats, smugglers adopted a variety of routes. The physical geography of Puget Sound, with hundreds of sparsely populated small islands situated amid narrow channels, made it a “smugglers’ paradise.” “It would be hard to imagine a more difficult region to police, or a fairer field for smugglers,” wrote one journalist. “Old London itself has scarcely a greater tangle of crooked and confusing thoroughfares than this archipelago possesses, and these waterways are so narrow and sheltered that mere oarsmen can safely and easily travel many of them.”45 Availing themselves of these myriad possibilities, some smugglers sailed directly south across the Straits of Fuca to Port Angeles on the Olympic Peninsula. Others simply crossed the twelve miles of bay to San Juan Island, an American possession on which a number of resident Chinese lived. Still others carried Chinese past the customs headquarters at Port Townsend and on into the Seattle area.46 Observers believed that smuggling on Puget Sound accounted for two-thirds of the undocumented Chinese entries that occurred in the Washington customs collection district.47 Most of this traffic appeared to have been the work of well-organized smuggling rings, some of which already plied the water of the sound to smuggle opium into the United States. Customs authorities and journalists believed that labor contractors with ties to Chinese merchants in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco used the extant smuggling network to orchestrate the smuggling of Chinese workers after 1882.48 Many Chinese migrants no doubt individually negotiated their passage across the sound into the United States. But a Washington newspaper outlined the popular understanding of Chinese smuggling as a large-scale enterprise in an 1884 article: The business of running Chinese, both male and female, from Victoria, British Columbia, into the United States is a well organized business, as much so as any legitimate branch of trade. Chinese merchants in Portland, Oregon, in Seattle, and other Sound ports in Washington Territory and Victoria, British Columbia, furnish the cash, and white men transact the business. It is a matter of almost nightly occurrence, the weather being very favorable, for one or more small sailing crafts to run past Port Townsend freighted with Chinese taken on board at Victoria, British Columbia. Since the Restriction act went into force, it is safe to say that thousands of Chinese have been smuggled into this country from the port of Victoria alone.49

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Figure 1.  This map, published in 1891, offers a bird’s-eye view of the Puget Sound area. The sprawling waterways of the border region proved useful to Chinese immigrants and smugglers trying to avoid detection. A contemporary journalist noted that “Old London itself has scarcely a greater tangle of crooked and confusing thoroughfares than this archipelago possesses.” Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

An 1887 letter from Customs Special Agent Herbert Beecher, stationed in Port Townsend, to the secretary of the treasury offered further details of the smuggling rings. Victoria-based smuggling rings sent groups of Chinese by way of small watercraft into landing spots on Puget Sound. Chinese “pilots” went along with the smuggled aliens to guide them into a safe Chinatown on the American side, but the boats themselves were piloted by a mixture of “whitemen . . . fishermen, Italians, Greeks, Indians and a mixture of all races.” Upon successfully landing the contraband Chinese, the boat captains received a certificate to that effect from the Chinese pilot. This in turn they redeemed back in Victoria, where the smugglers paid the white pilots $20 for each smuggled Chinese. Unsurprisingly, the traffic attracted men of a mercenary nature, many already involved in the opium trade. Beecher characterized them as men “utterly without principle.” In several instances, smugglers had “deliberately killed and thrown over board their cargo of humanity” to avoid capture by the customs revenue cutter.50

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A second pattern of Chinese immigration along the British Columbia border involved passage across the land border on the eastern side of the Cascade Mountains. Chinese miners had worked mine traces in the Canadian borderland valleys of the Kootenay Trail since the 1860s, and pockets of Chinese settlement persisted along the U.S. line into the 1880s. By 1884, far more Chinese worked on the route of the Canadian Pacific Railway, located approximately 100 miles north of the land border.51 West Coast restrictionists feared that the Chinese recruited from China to work on the Canadian railroad would eventually trickle into the United States in search of opportunities. “Unless more stringent measures are adopted to prevent the smuggling of Chinese . . . into Washington Territory,” warned San Francisco authorities in October 1883, “the thousands of Chinese now employed on the Canadian Pacific Railway will, as soon as the contracts are completed . . . find their way without difficulty into the United States.” Less than a year later, a Washington newspaper confirmed that “small parties [of Chinese] have stolen across the line from the Canadian Pacific Railway.”52 This heavily wooded, remote region of north-central Washington Territory provided an equally ideal crossing point for Chinese seeking surreptitious entry into the United States. Only a few American customs officers patrolled the sparsely populated area in the 1880s, principally focusing their attention on the river valleys.53 As the result of such paltry border surveillance, according to one observer, “there is no part of it over which a Chinaman may not pass into our country without fear of hindrance; there are scarcely any parts of it where he may not walk boldly across it at high noon.”54 Still, Chinese smuggling themselves across the border frequently relied on the services of guides or “Chinese pilots,” who showed them the best routes to use to cross the border undetected.55 Unlike the traffic through Victoria, backcountry border crossing typically involved Chinese traveling singly or in small groups.56 This smuggling pattern explains why traffic in the backcountry was lighter than coastal smuggling, and suggests as well that it was less tied to the organized smuggling rings that landed Chinese workers in profitable batches along the coast. Some Chinese came down the Columbia River into the United States “in boats and on horseback and on foot.” But since that waterway was a natural point for customs officers to conduct inspections, many stopped at a point just north of the American border. From there they took trails westward to the wagon roads and trails that crossed the border near the Kettle River and Rock Creek.57 On the 100 miles of international border between Kettle River and the

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Cascade Mountains, one customs inspector reported in 1890, “there is no difficulty for them in getting across. It is not necessary for them to take a trail to get across. . . . It is open country to the Cascade Mountains, and Chinese coming across avoid the trail as much as they can” because they know inspectors patrol it.58 As the 1880s wore on, the problem of Chinese entry via Canada spread. After the completion of Canada’s transcontinental railway link in 1885, organized smuggling rings appear to have adopted routes across the eastern section of the Canadian border.59 By the close of the 1880s, customs authorities along the eastern half of the U.S.-Canadian border were regularly reporting the detection of Chinese smuggling schemes. A newspaper account from March 1890 detailed how an organized group of smugglers in Port Huron, Michigan, had created “a sort of underground railway scheme” to transport Chinese workers into the United States.60 A year later, Lockport, New York, customs authorities detected a particularly ingenious scheme for smuggling Chinese across the border from Canada. The Chinese immigrants enter Canada via Vancouver and go to Toronto, where they are ticketed over the Grand Trunk and Erie to New-York. Sleeping-care berths are bought and the Chinamen are asleep in their berths when they pass [the border at] Suspension Bridge. . . . The special inspectors do not go through the sleepers, and thus they escape detection.61

Professional smuggling operations may have been the norm, but many Chinese workers also strategized the best way to cross the border on their own and undertook crossings without the benefit of smuggling networks. For instance, two Chinese men arrested in Buffalo in 1890 had paid $5 each to have themselves rowed across the river by local entrepreneurs. According to the report they provided their captors, they had landed at Vancouver, studied the situation on the border, and decided their best chance lay in entering the United States near Buffalo.62 It may be possible that their route reflected improved border enforcement on the western border, although it is just as likely that they chose to enter in the east because they intended to seek work or join family members in the eastern United States. Border enforcement efforts no doubt did improve over time along the border, as customs officials and Chinese inspectors came to be more familiar with smuggling practices and patterns. But their efforts to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act were hindered not simply by the physical geography of the borderlands. Whether they availed themselves of the op

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portunities to cross into the United States across the sound or the mountains, Chinese entering the Washington Customs District in the 1880s frequently took advantage of the region’s cultural geography as well. In particular, they relied on settlements of ethnic Chinese in the borderlands as crucial stepping stones in their transit into the United States. For instance, Chinese crossing the border between the Kettle River and the Cascades in the Washington Customs District reportedly made a practice of contacting the ethnic Chinese living on a nearby Indian reservation. Several Chinese had intermarried with tribeswomen and lived on the reservation in the 1880s. According to customs officials, these reservation Chinese made a practice of assisting their southbound countrymen, perhaps pointing out trails, sometimes informing them “where to get a pilot to get through” the border.63 More commonly Chinese immigrants took advantage of ethnically Chinese pockets in the borderlands as places where they could, by intermingling with local residents, become virtually invisible to customs authorities. After crossing into the United States, smuggled Chinese workers typically gravitated toward the nearest ethnic Chinese community, whether in Seattle or in a rural logging or mining camp. Once “they get into the Chinese camp and mix with the balance of the Chinese,” one inspector reported, “it is very difficult to tell who the recently arrived Chinese are.”64 And unless a customs inspector actually witnessed the border crossing, he could rarely prove that a Chinese migrant had entered the country illegally. If confronted, the new arrivals could simply claim that they were longtime residents and have other residents vouch for them. As a result, frustrated inspectors along the border could only watch as the small Chinese communities scattered across the American side of the border slowly swelled with new arrivals.65 Chinese settlements on the American side of the border were crucial. As the official border sought to render a person’s national identity meaningful in the context of immigration, it heightened the need of some potential immigrants to pretend or appear to be something they were not. In the case of recently emigrated undocumented Chinese in the 1880s, that meant trying to appear to be local, legal residents. In preparation for crossing they were coached on how to modify their dress and manners and language to appear to be a typical Chinese resident alien. As we shall see, this dynamic would continue in the coming decades, assuming a variety of manifestations. Even as the border regime attempted to sort migrants using rigid, determinate notions of identity, border-crossing migrants learned how to adapt themselves to the expectations of their immigra

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tion inspectors. In the course of the 1880s, Chinese immigrants would come to exploit the advantages of the physical and cultural geographies of America’s southern border with Mexico as well.

The Route through Mexico If Chinese settlement patterns in British Columbia had made smuggling through Washington in the 1880s an unsurprising development, the emergence in the late 1880s of Chinese smuggling routes through Mexico was more unexpected. Anglo-Chinese ties in the mid-nineteenth century had facilitated the passage of Chinese workers into British Columbia from the 1860s on, and that population presence had served as the basis for later smuggling networks. The Chinese population in Mexico, on the other hand, did not reach significant proportions until after an 1899 MexicanChinese treaty had opened the possibility for direct migration.66 Still, small numbers of Chinese had entered Mexico by the 1880s, settling primarily in the southern Yucatan peninsula and in the northern border states of Baja California, Sonora, and Chihuahua.67 Liberal elites in the Porfirio Díaz administration had begun actively promoting the idea of Chinese immigration to the undeveloped and relatively underpopulated Mexican north in the 1870s, noting approvingly the beneficial role that Chinese workers had played in developing the American West.68 The Chinese workers who found their way into Mexico before 1900 found employment opportunities in mines, haciendas, and railroads, and they soon began to develop their own humble manufacturies and mercantile stores.69 By 1890, the Chinese population in the Mexican border states remained very small, probably totaling no more than 500. But it had already become implicated in efforts to smuggle Chinese workers into the United States.70 Although large-scale smuggling of Chinese across the Mexican border would not arise until after 1900, undocumented entry began in the 1880s. It may have started within a year or two of the passage of the 1882 exclusion act, although it only seems to have attracted notice in the late 1880s, when it began to become more organized. By 1888, the illegal passage of Chinese through Mexico was being noted in the U.S. press and discussed in Congress. Already by that year, the Mexican foreign minister in Washington was coming under considerable pressure from American authorities to have Mexico prohibit Chinese immigration to its own soil.71 The timing of the development of this new route through Mexico suggests that it may have born some relationship to the passage of the 1888 Scott

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Act, which had altered the Chinese Exclusion Act by denying Chinese residents in the United States the right of travel back and forth to China. More important, the 1888 law had nullified the 24,443 “certificates of entry” that departing Chinese residents already had taken with them back to China as guarantees of their readmission to the United States.72 The Scott Law undoubtedly created a sharp rise in the demand for the services of smugglers. Certainly Chinese immigrants were being apprehended along the entire extent of the border, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific, at this time. There is evidence to suggest that Chinese attempting to enter the United States through the easternmost portion of the border—through El Paso and other Texas border towns—in the late 1880s and early 1890s may have migrated to Mexico by way of Cuba. By 1890 American consular officials had already detected a system whereby Chinese from Havana arrived at the Mexican port of Tampico “with through tickets to El Paso.”73 By December 1891, thirty-five Chinese immigrants had been apprehended in the Texas border towns of Del Rio and Eagle Pass. “A large portion of those recently captured,” according to a newspaper account, “were imported from Cuba by railroad contractors in Mexico.” When the northern sections of the Monterey and Mexican Gulf Road had been completed, “hundreds of them were thrown out of employment, and they are now making their way into the United States in large numbers.”74 Historian Lawrence Douglas Taylor Hansen has suggested that the twin cities of Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, which already by the mid-1880s formed an important railroad center with links to both coasts, served as the primary port of entry for undocumented Chinese migrants at this time, but there is little documentation of extensive smuggling there at this early date.75 Instead, the California and Arizona stretches of the border, by virtue of their proximity to the Pacific Ocean, appear to have been the favored routes around 1890. The Chinese inspector assigned to the El Paso custom collections district in 1890 acknowledged that Chinese arrived at El Paso by train seeking entry into the United States, but he downplayed the magnitude of the traffic. He instead urged that a mounted Chinese inspector be assigned to the southern Arizona town of Nogales, where he knew smuggling operations to be on the rise.76 As early as 1886, Lovell Jerome, a customs agent in Tucson, reported the “continued attempt on the part of Chinamen to enter the United States from Mexico.” Most of them, he believed, easily succeeded, and he presciently predicted the route would become a favored one for smugglers.77 An 1889 Treasury Department report first alleged that Chinese workers

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arriving in San Francisco had begun transferring to Mexico-bound ships heading to Ensenada, Guaymas, and Mazatlan on the Mexican coast.78 From there, the report asserted, the workers made their way north into the United States at points along the California and Arizona borders. An undercover operation designed to gather information about this smuggling route was detailed in a series of highly informative Treasury Department reports to Congress in April and June 1890, as well as in congressional testimony the following year.79 The development of Chinese smuggling routes through Mexico in the late 1880s and early 1890s appears to have been twofold. Initially, Chinese smuggling rings based in Hong Kong and San Francisco devised a plan to land Chinese workers bound for the United States in the small Mexican fishing village of Ensenada, located sixty miles south of the border near San Diego. Chinese immigrants sailed from Hong Kong to San Francisco, where, without landing in the United States, they transferred to Mexican steamers heading for Mexican Pacific coast cities. When the Mexican steamer first touched Mexican soil, the Chinese would disembark and make their way north, either by boat or wagon, into the United States. When a shipload of eighty Chinese on the steamboat Newbern disembarked in Ensenada on April 3, 1890, the U.S. consul in Ensenada immediately telegraphed customs authorities in San Diego. Within a matter of days, customs authorities in San Diego subsequently intercepted thirteen Chinese attempting to cross the land border near Tijuana and another ten trying to smuggle themselves into San Diego harbor aboard a small vessel captained by a Portuguese fisherman.80 American officials successfully prosecuted the captured Chinese immigrants and deported them directly to China. In the prosecution put forward by the government, the “fact was made plain that the effort to introduce [the Chinese] to the United States was far-reaching, systematic and preconcerted,” involving agents in China, the United States, and Mexico. Smugglers paid guides from $5 to $25 per head to take the Chinese from Ensenada to the border; those able to take the Chinese across the border and safely into San Diego’s Chinatown fetched between $40 and $50 a head.81 As was the case on the Canadian border, smugglers sometimes paid locals to do the actual smuggling for them. J. E. Williams, the Portuguese fisherman arrested in this incident, reported that he had been approached by a Chinese smuggler and offered $10 per head to carry the Chinese in from Ensenada on his boat. The offer represented the proverbial boat payment. As he “was in debt for his boat,” a local newspaper reported, Williams thought “he might make some money” out of the business.82

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Apparently the success of these American officials persuaded some Chinese smugglers to opt for the even more circuitous route of sending Chinese workers to the mainland Mexican port of Guaymas and thence to the Arizona border by rail. When the Newbern sailed again from San Francisco on April 25, laden with fifty more Chinese who had transferred in the harbor from a Chinese ship, the San Francisco customs collectors sent along two undercover officials. When fifteen Chinese disembarked at Ensenada on April 28, the customs officials wired to warn San Diego authorities. They then continued on board as the steamer headed toward Mazatlan and Guaymas with the balance of the Chinese passengers. All of the Chinese disembarked at Guaymas, and “every one of them took passage by railway to points within 35 or 40 or 50 miles from the border of the United States.” The undercover inspectors proceeded to stay in Mexico for another six weeks, tracking the movements of the Chinese and eventually coordinating with customs authorities in Arizona to intercept the various small groups as they tried to enter the United States near Tombstone and Nogales.83

The Advantages of the Border The undercover reports of 1890 illustrate the ways in which Chinese smuggling networks and American border enforcement officials played a cat-and-mouse game. The roundabout, dangerous, and expensive routes they took speak volumes about Chinese migrants’ desire to enter the United States, as well as their smugglers’ tenacity in pursing that objective. At the same time, the Chinese migrants’ experiences crossing the Mexican border in the 1890s reveal the ways in which the terrain and cultural geography of the borderland environment itself conspired against American efforts to prevent illicit entries. Congressional investigators holding hearings on Chinese smuggling in 1891 were informed, time and again, of the difficulties attendant on watching the Mexican border. Only one officer worked out of the customs house at Tombstone, Arizona, they learned, and “the border [there] is so large and so long and so rough that he cannot do his work.” A San Diego customs official reported that Chinese might safely cross any of the more than 150 remote trails and passes in the mountainous and isolated terrain just east of San Diego.84 At the same time, the tranquility of the San Diego coast offered opportunities for small boats to land Chinese migrants in area inlets and bays. With only three inspectors responsible for controlling the border over so vast



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an area, the idea of stopping many or most of the Chinese migrants was ludicrous. “More Chinamen came across and were never captured and never seen” in a year than were captured.85 Of course, the physical geography also gave immigration inspectors certain advantages as well. Large portions of the border, particularly the Sonoran Desert regions extending from eastern California through Mexico, were completely inhospitable, as more than one unfortunate Chinese migrant discovered. A party of Chinese attempting to cross the border from Mexico in 1890 reportedly got lost in the desert east of San Diego. According to a brief newspaper account, they “wandered about aimlessly for several days and suffered greatly.” A fourteen-year-old Chinese boy died from exposure.86 A remarkable 1891 illustration by renowned Western painter Frederic Remington portrayed an undocumented Chinese “coolie” dying of thirst in the western desert.87 The desert could act as a barrier, then, and inspectors knew that migrants would most likely cross the border in places with rail or road connections linking the Mexican interior or coast to U.S. cities and rail lines. For instance, the Chinese inspector responsible for guarding the Arizona border with Sonora in 1890 noted that “for a long distance east of Yuma, Ariz., the country is an uninhabited desert; absence of water, obscure trails, and great distances to be traveled overland preclude any extensive [Chinese] entry in that neighborhood.”88 But on balance, the border environment created more difficulties than advantages from the perspective of immigration authorities. Rural, remote, and mostly uninhabited, the natural border invited subversion of the national border. In addition to having a vast and unpopulated physical landscape across which to enter the United States, Chinese migrants coming across the Mexican border in the 1880s and 1890s enjoyed the same advantage that crossers through Canada exploited: the presence of ethnic Chinese communities situated on both sides of the border. Customs authorities cited this “underground railroad” as an effective tool of smugglers. The Treasury Department’s 1890 reports to Congress on smuggling routes through Ensenada and Guaymas included a crude “Map of Chinese Underground Railway” that detailed the Mexican borderland villages through which Chinese immigrants passed as they moved north from Ensenada: Real de Castillo, Burro Valley, Yalecites, and Carisco.89 The report highlighted the presence of ethnic Chinese living and working in these and other Baja towns. After 1899, when direct steamship service between China and Mexico greatly increased Chinese immigration to and through Mexico,



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Figure 2.  This remarkable drawing by Frederic Remington appeared in the March 1891 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, accompanying an article by Julian Ralph on the “Chinese leak” across the Canadian and Mexican borders. Although immigrants and smugglers attempted to use the remoteness of the southwestern desert terrain to their advantage, the desert also posed fatal dangers for unprepared crossers. “Dying of thirst in the desert,” as the caption notes, was one of them. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 82 ( March 1891).

the network of Chinese communities in the borderlands began to flourish. A 1906 report on Chinese smuggling cited this network as one of the principal “difficulties” on the Mexican border: All through northern Mexico, along the lines of railroad, are located socalled boarding houses and restaurants, which are the rendezvous of the Chinese and their smugglers, and the small towns and villages throughout this section are filled with Chinese coolies, whose only occupation seems to be lying in wait until arrangement can be perfected for carrying them across the border.90

Chinese immigrants who made it to the American side of the border found substantial Chinese communities there as well. In the borderland cities of El Paso, Tucson, and San Diego, Chinese communities stood ready to receive and support, at least temporarily, smuggled immigrants. Tucson had a Chinese population approaching 700 in 1890, while nearly

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1,000 Chinese worked in San Diego County during the same period. Members of the San Diego Chinese community worked principally as house servants, orchard hands, and fishermen. But according to one Chinese resident at the time, earning a little extra money by assisting smugglers could be lucrative as well.91 In El Paso, officials believed that many members of the substantial Chinese community had a hand in smuggling operations.92 But as important as any assistance they might provide in the actual border crossing was the refuge that members of these communities could offer new arrivals. A San Diego newspaper account from 1890 noted the ease with which Chinese smuggled in by sailboat had slipped from the harbor into the nearby Chinatown. A wharf night watchman had detected the Chinese, but “they had reached safe and secure quarters” in Chinatown before he could alert customs officials. “Once hid, it would be next to impossible to find one out.”93 In the midst of conditions favoring smuggling across the southern border in 1890, only a skeletal force of Chinese inspectors patrolled the vast space. Not surprisingly, the first group of inspectors afforded the opportunity to testify before Congress on the border situation introduced what would become the mantra of border authorities: provide funding for more manpower and equipment. If the United States intended to stop the practice of Chinese smuggling, several border inspectors suggested in 1891 testimony, it would have to vastly increase the manpower of the customs force. Customs inspector George Pattison, who had sailed on the steamer Newbern in April 1890 to track the smugglers’ routes, testified that the customs service force on the Arizona-Sonora border was “not sufficient to guard anything.” A former Chinese inspector in San Diego explained that the border between Southern California and Baja California had the same problem: “the force that has been there has never been large enough to guard the line.” At the same time, he wondered “whether it could possibly be made proper” to appoint a force large enough to safely guard the line.94 Alongside their appeals for greater numbers of inspectors, customs authorities also suggested that certain technological innovations might improve their ability to perform their work. One inspector suggested that Congress adopt the Mexican practice of equipping its customs inspectors with horses so that they could better patrol the line. The San Diego collector of customs testified that only with the addition of a steamship would his force have adequate means to guard the San Diego coastline.95 At least one congressman on the committee seemed encouraged by the notion that effective border control could be achieved with a little addi

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tional appropriation. Congressman Herman Stump surmised that with a “small force of cavalry stationed at different points along the line” and “revenue cutters coasting up and down the shore,” Chinese would no longer attempt to cross the line illegally.96 In their 1890 testimony before the joint committee investigating Chinese immigration, border officials also spent a fair amount of time arguing for changes in the terms of the Chinese exclusion laws. One problem cited repeatedly by frustrated officials was that, under the terms of the current law, Chinese detected entering the country illegally had to be deported to the “country from whence they came.” Most federal courts had interpreted this provision strictly, insisting that Chinese apprehended on either the Canadian or Mexican borders could only lawfully be deported back across those borders. But Treasury Department officials wished to send illegal entrants directly back to China instead. The problem, from their perspective, was that deportation to the contiguous countries was completely ineffectual. Deported Chinese simply continued to attempt entry until they succeeded.97 This phenomenon highlighted a centrally important third advantage that the contiguous borders afforded Chinese immigrants seeking entry into the United States: the convenience of a nearby staging area from which to enter American territory. Chinese immigrants were aided in their efforts to cross the border by the physical environment and cultural borderlands, but they were attracted to the borders primarily because they offered opportunities for multiple efforts at illegal entry. Whereas an immigrant turned back at San Francisco faced a long voyage home, Chinese workers detained along the Canadian or Mexican border were set back only a matter of yards. Border officers’ testimony on this point was impassioned, revealing the extent to which they felt they were engaged in an almost hopeless battle. H. H. Schell, the Chinese inspector responsible for the border between El Paso and Nogales, reported in 1890 that Chinese immigrants in his district often “attempt entry [from Mexico] with little effort at disguise or concealment. These are always turned back by customs officers; they return smilingly and, doubtless, seek entrance at some point on the line where no officers are stationed and at a time less favorable to detection.”98 Datus E. Coon, the Chinese inspector stationed in San Diego, made the point more emphatically in an April 1890 letter to the assistant secretary of the Treasury Department. “Should an officer take a Chinaman to the State line to-day, he will undoubtedly follow that officer back to the city the first dark night.” Indeed, he continued, “the children on the

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streets of this city laugh at me when I inform them that the punishment of a Chinaman . . . is to put him across the line into Mexico, as they know full well the Mongolian will be in our Chinatown early next morning for breakfast.”99 Multiple arrests of the same Chinese workers were common on both borders.100 Not only was deportation across the border ineffectual, it was often difficult as well. Canadian officials, for instance, sometimes refused entry to Chinese deportees who lacked the receipt proving they had earlier paid Canada’s $50 head tax on Chinese. More than once, U.S. and Canadian border officials pushed Chinese nationals back and forth across bridges, each insisting the migrants were inadmissible under national law.101 How should the United States handle these unique aggravations caused by Chinese exploitation of the border? Already by 1890 many officials supported efforts to encourage the neighboring Republic of Mexico and Dominion of Canada to adopt bans on Chinese immigration. In May 1890 the U.S. House and Senate had, by concurrent resolution, asked President Grover Cleveland to negotiate treaties with Great Britain and Mexico to prevent the illegal entry of Chinese across American borders.102 Many border officials hoped that the two nations might be persuaded to ban Chinese labor immigration outright.103 But if American laws could not be pressed beyond the nation’s borders, perhaps its agents could be. At least one border official testified in favor of extending the practice of having American Treasury Department officers work undercover in Mexico to track Chinese smugglers. Apparently American officers had been granted permission to enter Mexican territory on many occasions, and the Mexican governor of Baja California was reportedly well disposed to their presence. Why not, one officer suggested, permanently have “a man there . . . to keep posted and make it his business to know when the Chinamen were coming up and watch them cross”? Ironically, then, efforts to enforce the boundary line could lead to proposals for disregarding the line. Ultimately, however, inspectors pinned their hopes on Congress modifying the existing law to permit Chinese deportees to be sent back to China rather than back across the border.104 From the testimony of American border officials stationed on the Mexican and Canadian borders in the 1880s, we can also begin to see how the work culture of border enforcement developed. Not surprisingly, we discover that from the beginnings of the border control regime in the 1880s, race mattered on the border. Initial American immigration restrictions were driven by outright racial prejudice, as in the case of the Chinese exclusion laws and the subsequent barring of Asian immigra

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tion, as well as by fears of labor competition hopelessly intertwined in the ethnocentrisms of the hour. By placing racial markers at the center of the law’s enforcement, these acts ultimately racialized the national borders and shaped the practice and culture of undocumented immigration and immigration law enforcement. Not surprisingly, the first federal officials stationed at the border to monitor immigration in the 1880s were principally attuned to the differences of race and ever vigilant for visible markers of difference. More than one customs official credited the Chinese success in border smuggling to the “similarity, deceit and cunning of the race.” A customs inspector who had worked at the Windsor Ferry crossing point near Detroit in the 1880s put the matter bluntly to congressional investigators in June 1890. Describing the manner in which customs officials informally decided which ferry passengers to question, Orson B. Curtis noted that “as regards Chinamen, we know by their face what they are, and we don’t let them in.”105 The physical difference of Chinese immigrants made them relatively easy to spot on the Canadian border. In later years Chinese often succeeded in disguising themselves as Mexicans on the Mexican border in order to cross illegally, but their success only underscores the degree to which racial markers mattered. Given this set of attitudes highlighting the racial difference of the “alien” Chinese trying to enter the United States, it is unsurprising that early enforcement personnel adopted military language to describe their work. One glimpse of this may suffice. Datus Coon, the Chinese Inspector for the San Diego Customs District, addressed a report to his supervisor, the San Diego Customs Collectors, in April 1890. In it, he details the efforts he had made to prevent the entry of a group of Chinese known to be traveling north from the Mexican port of Ensenada. I immediately set to work to organize a force of constables . . . to patrol the country along the State line on the border of Mexico. . . . While this force was being collected I learned by private dispatch from Ensenada that the exact number of Chinamen landed . . . was eighty-three. . . . I found means during Thursday and Friday to learn of their progress, and that it would be necessary for my men to be on guard at the line on the night of the latter day. . . . During Saturday scouts were sent south of the State line some 15 miles to locate the enemy. They were counted and reports made during the day of their progress. . . . The commander of the constabulary force was directed by me to put out pickets at once at all possible points of ingress along the State line. . . . My headquarters at once assumed the appearance of an old war-time ‘out post,’ on

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picket duty, eagerly watching the expected momentary advance of the enemy.106

Coon and his allies succeeded in capturing twelve Chinese migrants who attempted to cross the border after midnight, although they apparently needed the help of the Tijuana constable to do so. The language of his report becomes outright florid in the face of victory. Coon’s letter suggests not only the degree to which the initial federal personnel working on the border had adopted overtly military language to describe their work, but also that they spoke to some extent of undocumented aliens as the enemy. In this manner we can see the beginnings of how the matter of difference, marked for the most part by race, would become situated in the bureaucratic traditions of surveillance and policing that came to reside in the border control regime. By the late 1880s, then, American land borders were feeling the uncomfortable practical effects of the uncoordinated patchwork of restrictive immigration laws that had been passed after 1882. The experiences with national immigration restrictions in the 1880s introduced patterns on the borders of smuggling, illicit entry, and border policing that presaged developments through the 1930s and beyond. Fundamental patterns of human cross-border migration and border enforcement efforts now long familiar to us first emerged on the Mexican and Canadian borders in the decade of the 1880s: furtive undocumented crossings, professional coyotes (smugglers), U.S. surveillance efforts, demands for expanded expenditure on manpower and resources for enforcement, and candid acknowledgment that the physical geography of the border made it indefensible. Developments in the 1880s provided the initial impetus for consideration of new border-crossing policies. The migration of European and Chinese immigrants across the Canadian and Mexican borders in the 1880s forced a recognition that effective immigration laws would require effective administration of national land borders. Enforcing immigration laws at American seaports while neglecting to do so at land borders, critics pointed out, was tantamount to barring one’s front door against intruders while leaving the back door wide open. Taken together, the 1880s border crossings of paupers and Chinese gave new meanings to the American land borders with Canada and Mexico and made the borders newly visible to advocates of immigration restriction. Even as Americans continued to debate who ought to be admitted to or excluded from the United States, they began to discover the difficulty of enforcing their wishes along the nation’s shared land borders.

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Still, although restrictionists in Congress grew alarmed by the permeability of the Mexican and Canadian borders, they regarded it as only a peripheral problem. Testimony before congressional investigating committees in the late 1880s and early 1890s focused primarily on other concerns, such as expanding the list of excludable immigrants and the perceived need to assert stronger federal control over immigration administration in general and over the operations of the port of New York in particular. Federal officials as well as ardent restrictionists paraded before congressional committees to share horror stories about the vagaries of enforcement under the current system of administration. When reforms came, in the form of the Immigration Act of 1891, the unique problems of border enforcement remained largely unaddressed. It would take a decade of federal administration experience—and another large push of illicit immigrants across the Canadian and Mexican borders at the turn of the century—before the United States would undertake a serious effort to control immigration across its borders.



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Dr awi ng t h e Li nes: Bluepri nts for Immigr at ion Enforcement on t h e Borders, 1 89 1–19 10

Chapter 3

The strength practically of the guard established on our boundaries, land and water, is little better than that at its weakest point. Frank P. Sargent, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1902

When the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of congressional oversight of immigration in 1889, it did so on the basis of a commonsense understanding of sovereignty. Any independent nation, the court reasoned, ought to exercise “jurisdiction over its own territory.” Such jurisdiction included the power to admit and exclude foreigners from its territory.1 The effect of the court’s ruling, upholding the ability of Congress to set and enforce federal immigration restrictions, coincided with the political temperament of the day. Amid the economic hardships and national political turmoil of the 1890s, voices demanding further reform of American immigration policy gained influence in Congress and successfully pressed the case for expanding the classes of restricted aliens. But even as the court recognized that the principle of sovereignty gave the federal government the right to monitor crossings of its physical borders, immigrants to the United States continued to undermine the exercise of that sovereignty by demonstrating the essential vulnerability of those borders. In fact, additions to the proscribed classes of immigrants through the 1890s and 1900s deepened and reformulated the already existing problems of undocumented immigration and led directly to an increase in borderland smuggling. New smuggling networks emerged to serve the needs of the newly banned immigrant classes, many of them the so-called “new immigrants” from Southern and Eastern Europe, by making use of still lightly patrolled land borders. As what had been perceived as a “Chinese problem” on the borders became a more generalized “immigration problem,” the difficulties of border enforcement edged from the periphery to the center of American immigration enforcement efforts.

As a result, the 1890s and 1900s witnessed the first federal effort to institute systems of immigration control at U.S. land borders, efforts that would have profound implications for both the Canadian and the Mexican border. The Immigration Act of 1891 had ended an unsatisfying decadelong experiment with state administration of federal immigration laws by creating the office of the superintendent of immigration and authorizing the development of a federal Bureau of Immigration.2 While restrictionists and their allies in Congress spent much of the 1890s waging a highprofile campaign for a literacy requirement for immigrants, authorities in the newly created Bureau of Immigration wrestled with the problems of adequately enforcing the restrictions already in law. The new patterns of undocumented border crossing, principally through Canada in the 1890s but increasingly through Mexico after 1900, consumed an increasing amount of the new agency’s attention and energies. This chapter examines the Bureau of Immigration’s efforts to regulate immigrant entry and, in particular, land border crossings from the time of the passage of the 1891 Immigration Act through the start of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. During this period, Bureau of Immigration officials struggled to impose a system of inspection on border-crossing immigrants and to bring an end to undocumented border crossings on the Canadian and Mexican borders. Central to those efforts was an extraordinary set of agreements by which Bureau of Immigration inspectors were stationed at Canadian seaports and permitted to examine—and reject— U.S.-bound immigrants as they arrived on Canadian soil in the 1890s. But the effectiveness of that approach was short-lived, and the bureau had resorted to establishing a dedicated inspection and patrol force along the border by 1901. An effective end to patterns of European immigrant entry through Canada came only after the Canadian government itself began more thoroughly scrutinizing and screening immigrants arriving at its seaports after 1902. Not surprisingly, a solution to the problem of undocumented entry and immigrant smuggling on the northern border deepened the bureau’s problems on the nation’s southern border. The increased likelihood of being detected and detained on the Canadian border after 1902 encouraged individual immigrants and professional immigrant smuggling rings to adopt routes through Mexico rather than Canada. By 1905 the principal lines of traffic for undocumented Asian and European migrants ran through Mexico, and the bureau shifted its energies to crafting a Mexican solution. But the Mexican border proved, for a variety of reasons, far less amenable to the reforms American officials desired. Efforts to negotiate

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agreements permitting American officials to conduct seaport inspections of U.S.-bound immigrants encountered a Mexican government unreceptive to the notion of granting extraterritoriality to American law. At the same time, Mexico’s political elites remained committed to a modernization program that sought to stimulate foreign immigration, and there was no Mexican parallel to the American and Canadian immigration restriction movements. With neither of those “first lines of defense” in place, the whole work of discouraging undocumented border entry fell to the newly inaugurated federal inspection force on the border. Even the rapid growth of that force through the 1900s, however, did little to effectively curtail smuggling in the face of growing demand.

Further Restrictions As in the previous decade, the drafting of borders began in the political imagination. Political efforts to define and filter out the “wrong sort” of immigrant aliens, begun in 1882, continued with increased urgency in the 1890s and 1900s. Over a sixteen-year period between 1891 and 1907, Congress substantially expanded the statutory restrictions banning certain classes of immigrant aliens from admission to the United States. At the same time, political pressures increased for measures that would begin to restrict the overall volume of immigration. The 1890s nativism that translated itself into the restrictive immigration measures of the decade was, in many ways, of a piece with that of the 1880s, discussed earlier. “No clear division separated the two decades . . . in the history of nativism,” according to John Higham, but “the general temperature was hotter in the latter decade.”3 In fact, the most significant immigration legislation of the 1890s, the Immigration Act of 1891, actually represented the fruit of the highly publicized congressional investigations of American immigration policy in the late 1880s.4 The 1891 immigration law, in addition to establishing a federal bureau to oversee immigration matters, redefined and extended the list of excludable classes in several important ways. It expanded upon the Immigration Act of 1882 by adding polygamists, “those convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude,” and “persons with loathsome or contagious diseases” to the list of inadmissible aliens.5 In an attempt to broaden the contract labor prohibition of 1885, the 1891 law also subjected to exclusion those immigrants who had been encouraged to emigrate because of employer advertisements or who had otherwise been “assisted” in their passage.6 In terms of stimulating illicit traffic across the borders, the ban on individuals with

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infectious or loathsome diseases was probably the most significant. Over the next twenty years the borders developed into alternative routes for those judged medically unfit. The new law also altered the wording related to the exclusion of potential paupers in a way that illustrated a central difficulty of immigration administration. The 1882 law had barred “those unable to care for themselves without becoming public charges.” The new law barred “those likely to become public charges.” The shift was important, as Kitty Calavita has argued, because under the new language, inspectors were not simply empowered to assess the present condition of an applicant but to prognosticate the applicant’s future as well. The change reflected the continued complaints of local welfare officials from New York and elsewhere that the foreign-born poor predominated in charity caseloads. At the same time, it represented the beginning of a trend toward granting wide administrative discretion to federal immigration inspectors—a theme I return to later.7 Almost immediately after the passage of the 1891 act, proponents of even more thoroughgoing restrictions pressed for further legislation. After the Panic of 1893 derailed the economy they gained greater influence, and they spent much of the 1890s and 1900s trying to advance the cause of a literacy test for aliens. The idea of a literacy test, first proposed by Edward W. Bemis in 1887, found a champion in Representative Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts four years later.8 The Republican congressman’s efforts to gain adoption of a literacy requirement for alien immigrants were grounded in a patrician faith in Anglo-Saxon superiority and a belief that literacy would both reduce the overall volume of immigration and disproportionately weed out the “new immigrants” from Southern and Eastern Europe.9 Lodge first introduced the idea during House debates on the 1891 legislation. Bills to implement a literacy test were introduced in 1893 and again in 1895.10 After midterm elections in 1894 gave the Republicans control of both houses of Congress, the Republican majority, with significant Democratic support, sent a literacy test bill to the White House. But, as one of his final acts as president, Democrat Grover Cleveland vetoed the bill. In his veto message Cleveland called the measure a “radical departure” from the American tradition of open immigration.11 Literacy test advocates would have to wait another twenty years before seeing their vision enacted. Meanwhile, restriction advocates did succeed in the 1900s in otherwise extending the catalog of restricted classes. The 1903 Immigration Act prohibited the admission of epileptics, prostitutes, and professional



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beggars. Long-simmering fears of alien political philosophies and labor radicalism, newly animated by anarchist Leon Czolgosz’s assassination of President McKinley in 1901, led to the inclusion of a ban on anarchists in the 1903 act.12 A 1907 statute added “imbeciles” and persons afflicted with tuberculosis. In addition, the head tax, considered by some to be at least a moderate brake on immigration, grew eightfold between 1891 and 1907, from fifty cents to $4. Proposals to raise it higher still appeared regularly in Congress.13 During the same period of time, Congress extended its prohibitions on immigration from Asia in ways that showed that constructions of an Asian racial menace had lost little currency from earlier decades. While Congress addressed white anxieties about the changing racial character of new European immigrants in the 1890s in circumspect fashion through the literacy test, it addressed the racial fears stimulated by Asian immigration more directly. Congress extended the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 for ten more years in 1892. In 1902, it made the ban permanent. In response to intense anti-Japanese agitation on the West Coast in the early 1900s, Congress included a provision in the 1907 act that enabled President Theodore Roosevelt to negotiate the so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan in 1907–1908, by which Japan agreed to limit emigration to the United States.14 As noted in the previous chapter, Chinese exclusion in the 1880s had directly stimulated smuggling across the Canadian and Mexican borders; extension of the exclusion—and its de facto extension to include Japanese workers—perpetuated the borderlands markets for smuggling. By 1907, then, American lawmakers had devised an immigration code that targeted at least eight different groups of aliens: a racial class, principally the Chinese; an “immoral” class, generally composed of suspected prostitutes; the politically subversive; contracted laborers; criminals; paupers and those likely to become public charges; the mentally defective; and those suffering poor health or physical defects. The everexpanding list of excludable aliens reflected, in hodgepodge fashion, the welter of cultural, economic, and political anxieties that drove the politics of restriction.15 But for all its articulation in the 1890s and 1900s, American immigration policy remained piecemeal and of only limited effectiveness. In reality, many of the restrictions aimed at European immigrants—the restrictions on paupers, contract laborers, and the infirm, for instance— appear to have been more politically symbolic than substantial.16 The



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Department of the Treasury estimated that the 1891 law had prevented 50,000 of the “most objectionable classes” of European from emigrating to the United States in 1892, presumably because steamship agents had refused to sell tickets to excludable immigrants. But the department refrained from making specific claims for the effectiveness of the restrictions in subsequent years.17 At the same time, despite hopes that the new laws would effect a visibly material decrease in the numbers of aliens admitted, the rates of rejection at Ellis Island and other ports of entry never exceeded 1.5 percent before 1900.18 Looking at the terms of the law, one might expect rejection rates to have been higher. Between the contract labor prohibition and the “likely to become a public charge” provision of the 1891 law, immigrants had to walk a potentially tight line to demonstrate their admissibility. On the one hand, they had to demonstrate their ability to earn a competency in the United States; on the other hand, they were prohibited from suggesting that they had already secured, by contract, employment ensuring that competency. An immigrant had to convey the sense of having opportunities without being too specific about those opportunities. That the overwhelming majority succeeded suggests that neither of these restrictions was, in practice, overly restrictive. The House Industrial Commission concluded in 1901 that the contract labor law was “practically a nullity.”19 At the same time, enforcement of the prohibitions on criminals, convicts, polygamists, and assisted immigrants was virtually impossible because “the law supplie[d] almost no means of ascertaining the facts.” By and large, immigration inspectors had only an immigrant’s selfrepresentations to rely on. For good reason, one study has characterized the immigration restrictions of this era to filter European immigrants as “mildly exclusive and largely ineffectual statutes.”20 The inefficacy of the new restrictions also related directly to the fact that enforcement efforts lagged far behind policy development. The bureaucracy charged with the enforcement of the 1891 act remained small and underfunded through 1903, and it only slowly gained responsibility for coordinating the enforcement of the contract labor and Chinese labor prohibitions. It was not simply the improvisational quality of restrictive legislation itself but also the federal government’s lack of administrative capacity that limited the effectiveness of the new prohibitions.21 Nowhere was that lack of enforcement capacity more glaringly evident than on the U.S. land borders. To put in effect the myriad restrictions of immigration law in the 1890s, to give meaning to the laws, must have seemed a daunting



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task to federal officials—and all the more daunting for the United States’ virtually open borders.

A Fledgling Bureaucracy To appreciate the importance of developments on the Canadian and Mexican borders during this period requires an understanding of the bureaucratic context in which immigration law enforcement was occurring. The significance of the Immigration Act of 1891 lay as much in its establishment of direct federal oversight and administration of immigration as in the new exclusions it enacted. In fact, the principal purpose of the act was to provide for direct federal control over the inspection process at U.S. ports of entry. Congress authorized the appointment of a superintendent of immigration who, under the control and supervision of the secretary of the treasury, would administer federal immigration laws. The fledgling office was assigned a staff of three clerks. The superintendent and his Washington staff oversaw the work of a set of presidentially appointed immigration commissioners at the various port cities, who in turn orchestrated the activities of a professional staff of immigration inspectors and Public Health Service physicians. Herman Stump, a former congressmen, was appointed superintendent in 1893 by President Grover Cleveland to serve under Secretary of the Treasury Charles Foster. He was replaced by President McKinley in August 1897 with Terence Powderly, former head of the Knights of Labor.22 Although firmly under federal authority after 1891, the administration of immigration law remained highly decentralized for the next decade. Responsibilities for enforcement of the various restrictions remained splintered among several groups of inspectors. For instance, immigration inspectors appointed under the terms of the 1891 law had no responsibilities related to the ban on Chinese worker immigration. Instead, customs collectors and the Chinese inspectors appointed under them retained responsibility for the enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Acts. In a similar manner, enforcement of the Foran Act’s prohibition on contract labor had fallen to specially designated contract labor inspectors since 1887. Such inspectors, stationed at various ports of entry, worked alongside immigration inspectors but had responsibilities limited to detecting contract laborers.23 This uncoordinated administration in the 1890s resulted from the ad hoc nature of immigration legislation up to 1891. The trend after 1891 was



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toward centralization, but the process was slow. In 1895, in an initial effort to coordinate administration, the commissioner-general of immigration had been given direct oversight of the contract labor inspectors, although they remained a distinct inspection branch. In 1900, Congress attempted a similar coordination of the enforcement of the Chinese exclusion laws and immigration regulations by placing Chinese inspection under the authority of the Bureau of Immigration. Again, actual inspection remained the responsibility of customs collectors, but they now reported to and received instructions from the Bureau of Immigration rather than the secretary of the treasury. With the creation of the Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903, authority for the administration of the Chinese exclusion laws was placed firmly in the hands of the commissioner-general. Still, local administration of the Chinese exclusion and general immigration laws remained bifurcated, even under the office of the commissionergeneral, until October 1909, when unified immigration districts were created around the country.24 Not only were enforcement activities divided among various agencies, the forces of the Bureau of Immigration itself remained small. The creation of a large, active enforcement bureaucracy had hardly been the goal of many in Congress in 1891. During the 1890s the United States still imagined it could get meaningful enforcement of immigration statutes on the cheap. The law contemplated that the Bureau of Immigration and its officers would act as a second line of defense. Responsibility for weeding out the unwanted was laid firmly at the feet of the transAtlantic steamship lines that carried immigrants to American shores. The law held steamship lines liable for the cost of returning debarred aliens to their original port.25 In the short run, American officials believed the law was achieving its end by forcing steamship companies to undertake the burden of inspection at foreign ports. The secretary of the treasury reported in 1892 that the companies, fearful of the costs of deportation, had initiated a system of emigrant inspections in Europe. Three years later, the department reaffirmed that the burden of inspection fell heaviest on foreign transport companies rather than American inspectors. American laws had initiated not one but three “careful inspections, one at the home of the emigrant prior to the purchase of the ticket, one at the port of embarkation, and one upon arrival in this country.” Under such a system, the cost of American enforcement was kept to a minimum.26 By design, then, the bureau was to be a relatively lean operation. This vision of enforcement—rooted in screening by the private-sector transportation companies—helps explain the fiscal conservatism with

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which Congress approached budgeting for enforcement. Not only was the central administration small, Congress continued the practice of funding immigration control activities through the immigrant head tax. Under the terms of the 1882 law, revenues generated from the immigrant head tax funded the immigrant relief and enforcement activities at the various ports of entry. Further, until 1903, the funds expended on relief and enforcement at a particular port could not exceed the head taxes collected at that same port; head-tax revenue could not be pooled and redistributed to support activities at the various ports. A port could expend only as much on inspection personnel and immigrant housing as it took in annually through the head tax.27 This funding model radically limited enforcement activities along the Mexican and Canadian borders and in fact encouraged border smuggling. As discussed in an earlier chapter, the 1882 Immigration Act had exempted immigrants crossing those frontiers from payment of the head tax. As a result, with no head-tax-paying immigrants entering at the land borders, no funds were available for the Bureau of Immigration to employ immigration inspectors at points along those borders. Under the terms of the 1891 law, only a single immigration inspector could be assigned to each customs district, and that inspector’s duties could include, in the interest of economy, customs work as well.28 A few contract labor inspectors, whose salaries were funded separately, were stationed at ports of entry on the borders as well as at seaports after 1892. But local commissioners of immigration and immigration inspectors, the heart of the new Bureau of Immigration’s enforcement efforts, were generally not appointed on the land borders in the 1890s.29 Administration of the new laws proved disappointing in the 1890s for a variety of reasons. As had been the case in the 1880s, inspections at the various maritime ports of entry were of uneven quality. Even at the flagship station at Ellis Island, the system of inspection did not ensure the exclusion of all those contemplated under the laws. One American immigration official, after touring European ports in the mid-1890s, reported that “it is the popular belief in provincial England that those who are not beyond doubt outside of the prohibited classes can pass muster by evasion and reservation when being examined by the United States immigration inspectors.” In other words, savvy immigrants who were not visibly suffering from a disability or disease could control their own fates by what they revealed and what they chose not to reveal.30 But the problem of immigrant entry through Canada topped the list of Bureau of Immigration concerns, for, in the words of that same inspector, “when evasion and

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reservation are not considered quite effective there is always a way open via Canada.”31 Like the Chinese before them, many members of the new excluded classes proved disinclined to accept the authority of American immigration law. The attraction of work and, as was frequently the case, reunion with kin in the United States outweighed the arcane legal proscriptions that confronted them. And like the Chinese, bound and determined to enter the United States, they increasingly headed for American land borders. Recognition that undocumented entry by way of the Canadian border represented a threat to the larger system of immigration administration provided one important focus for the newly hatched immigration bureaucracy in the 1890s. Leaders of the Bureau of Immigration, in a spirit of confident reform and equipped with faith in the power of systematic administration and technological innovations, undertook ambitious efforts to eliminate that threat at the turn of the century. But in so doing they encountered the problem that had bedeviled customs officials charged with Chinese exclusion since 1882. In the face of determined immigrants and well-organized smuggling organizations, the goal of establishing well-regulated borders would prove expensive and maddeningly elusive.32

Reforming the Canadian Border It did not take long for American authorities to understand that the new requirements of American immigration law—particularly the restrictions targeting the diseased and those restricting immigrants from Asia— stimulated new efforts to cross into the United States illicitly through Canada and, increasingly after 1900, Mexico. At least some of the 50,000 European immigrant aliens who had purportedly been denied steamship passage to the United States in 1892 may in fact have booked passage for Canada instead, with the full intent of then entering the United States. A group of American immigration commissioners, on an inspection trip of European conditions in 1891, returned with that very conviction.33 In his annual report of 1891, the treasury secretary reported that “with the increasing efficiency of inspection at our several seaports, and the fact of this vigilance made known to intending emigrants in Europe, an increasing number of aliens are now landing at Canadian ports and thence entering the United States by rail, thus practically avoiding all effective scrutiny.”34 In fact, at least one European steamship agent in the mid1890s held the opinion that “anyone who really wanted to go to America

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could scarcely be kept out” by the American authorities.35 Here was the Chinese exclusion enforcement lesson of the 1880s replayed with a new set of actors in a new decade. This undocumented immigration never occurred on a scale that directly threatened the effectiveness of the new immigration restrictions. That is, the overwhelming majority of aspiring immigrants continued to land at U.S. seaports. But federal immigration officials in the early 1890s understandably viewed border smuggling of immigrants as a potential threat to the efficacy of the whole enterprise of immigration restriction on which they were embarking. If excludable immigrants successfully developed alternative overland routes into the United States, they reasoned, present and future efforts to filter aliens at seaports would become meaningless. Equipped with an understanding that the border being drawn around the United States was only as strong as its weakest link, they quickly turned their attention to remedying the Canadian leak. In 1891, American immigration authorities imagined several solutions to the problem of European immigration through Canada. There continued to be hope that the Canadian government might itself enact laws to exclude undesirable immigrants from its territory. But a different set of attitudes toward immigration prevailed in Canada through the 1890s; stimulating, rather than restricting, European immigration continued to be the focus of Canadian government policy.36 In his 1891 annual report, the secretary of the treasury held out hope for an international system of uniform seaport inspections that would diminish the movement of the diseased and infirm. Otherwise, he noted, the United States faced the prospect of instituting an effective inspection system spanning the length of the border, with sufficient facilities and personnel to make inspection procedures effective. Presumably that would mean detailing both inspection officers and patrol officers.37 The treasury secretary in fact dispatched Superintendent of Immigration Herman Stump to investigate the possibility of instituting border inspections in early 1893. But Stump, daunted in part by the 4,000-mile-long border, instead proposed investigating whether it might be possible to place American inspectors at Canadian seaports. It was, he concluded later, “a plan that would obviate the expense and the necessity of establishing this border line.”38 In the name of efficiency and fiscal restraint, then, American immigration officials adopted the unorthodox idea of requesting that Canada permit U.S. immigration authorities to inspect U.S.-bound steamship passengers as they arrived in Canada. The plan effectively extended the inspection procedures prevailing at Ellis Island to the Canadian sea

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ports. Within a year or two of the 1891 enactment, American officials had opened negotiations with the Canadian government asking that American immigration law be granted the unusual privilege of extraterritoriality. An agreement directly involving the Canadian government reportedly fell apart at the last minute after newspaper reports in Canada sparked popular protest about the abdication of Canadian sovereignty under the proposal. American officials succeeded, however, in entering agreements directly with the several steamship lines carrying immigrants to Canada and with the two railroad lines that carried immigrants from the seaports to the U.S. border. Under the terms of an October 1893 agreement, the steamship lines agreed to present U.S.-bound immigrants for inspection by U.S. immigration officials and physicians at Canadian seaports. The steamship lines further agreed to pay the immigrant head tax as if landing the immigrants directly in American territory, to furnish the space and facilities for American inspection officials, and to deny landing to any immigrants debarred by American immigration authorities. Canadian railroads agreed, in conjunction with this, to sell rail tickets for U.S. destinations only to those immigrants who had passed inspection and been given official certificates of inspection. Such certificates would be accepted by customs or immigrations officials at the American line as proof of admissibility. All of these agreements, while not carrying the force of Canadian law, had the tacit approval of Canadian officials.39 The unusual agreements were inaugurated in October 1893. American immigration inspectors and Marine Hospital Service physicians began inspecting arriving immigrants at the Canadian ports of Halifax, Quebec, Point Levis, Vancouver, and Victoria. In the first full year of operation, they inspected 5,988 U.S.-bound immigrants. By 1900 the number had risen to 23,200. The arrangement worked to the general satisfaction of American authorities, and all parties signed a modified agreement again in 1896. That agreement added the port of St. John’s, in Newfoundland, which had become popular as a port during the winter months.40 The success of these Canadian seaport inspections was short-lived. The inspection system had not in fact limited the ability of immigrant aliens to purchase passage through Canada. It simply required them to dissemble about their intended destination. Declaring on a steamship manifest that you intended to pass through Canada and on into the United States meant that you subjected yourself to U.S. authorities upon arrival in Canada. Claiming instead a final destination in Canada meant you dodged such inspection. And, once landed in Canada, what was to stop you from get-



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ting to the U.S. border? The railroad firms had agreed to ticket only those U.S.-bound immigrants with certificates of inspection, but the simple subterfuge of having a third party purchase tickets often solved that problem. Alternatively, one could freely purchase a ticket to a destination near the international boundary with the United States.41 At the border itself, the only obstacle to entry into the United States was the lack of a head-tax receipt proving inspection. But, because of the skeletal and inattentive customs force, that proved no real obstacle at all. At less heavily trafficked ports, it remained easy enough to cross without any scrutiny whatsoever from American customs officials. Prior to 1901, inspectors worked only at the more heavily traveled ports of entry. The immigrants, naturally, avoided all those points. Along the Canadian side of the New York border, many immigrants simply waited to “catch the inspector off his beat” and walked into the country “unimpeded.” At ports with more substantial customs inspection procedures, the inspection itself was hardly foolproof. So that trains not be unduly delayed, the collection of certificates at the principal ports was accomplished by American inspectors who boarded U.S.-bound trains a few stops before the border and walked through the train looking for “people who look like aliens” and asking for certificates. The problem with that approach, however, was that some immigrants “get in the hands of these guides and smugglers, who dress them up, wash them, and make them look as if they had been in Canada for a long time.” Alternately, immigrants presented themselves at the border with a round-trip ticket, claiming that they were not emigrating but were simply going into the United States for a visit. Failing these efforts to dodge inspection at the port of entry, immigrants could always cross surreptitiously at neglected points along the border or under cover of night.42 For all the effort and energy invested in devising the system of American inspections at Canadian seaports, it required remarkably little guile on the part of an immigrant to subvert the system. Friends and relatives in the home country or in the United States, as well as commission-driven steamship agents in Europe, remained only too happy to explain this alternative route to immigrants desirous of U.S. entry. The route particularly attracted those deemed inadmissible on medical grounds. Canadian ticket agents in Europe reputedly made “the rounds of all the emigrants’ rendezvous” in search of emigrants who had been denied tickets directly to the United States. They did this precisely so that “they might book them to Canada.”43 The system of Canadian seaport inspections had been in-



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vented as a means to avoid the institution of a costly border inspection and patrol regime on the Canadian frontier. Instead, the system only delayed for a few years the development of such a regime. By 1898, American immigration officials were already conceding defeat and advocating abandoning the seaport inspection system in favor of a system of more effective immigrant inspections directly at the border. Two years later officials called for a system of border inspection, as “no other plan short of the enactment of our immigration laws by Canada will accomplish the purpose of enforcing” American immigration law.44 In fact, Canada soon passed immigration restrictions that closely paralleled American laws. In 1900, it restricted the immigration of paupers and criminals; in 1902, it forbade the landing of those with dangerous, loathsome, or infectious diseases.45 In the meantime, Bureau of Immigration officials contemplated plans to reform administration on the Canadian border. American inspections at Canadian seaports continued for several more years. But after 1902, those inspections were supplemented with a force of immigration inspectors detailed to the international boundary line. The era of direct border enforcement had begun. Of course, neither the Canadian nor the Mexican land border had been—theoretically, at least—entirely barren of enforcement personnel before 1901. Under the funding and administration scheme in place through the 1890s, the enforcement of immigration regulations on the Canadian and Mexican land borders fell to the collectors of customs at the various ports of entry.46 Beginning in June 1892, custom officials on the two borders were specifically charged with directing enforcement of the immigration laws on the borders. Immigration inspectors had been assigned to several customs districts, under the authority of the customs collector, principally for that purpose. Treasury Department officials in Washington imagined that the customs collectors and their staffs, to the best of their abilities, would approximate the immigrant inspection process occurring regularly at American seaports. An August 1892 circular from the acting secretary of the treasury in Washington, written during an overseas cholera epidemic, dictated that health inspections ought to be part of the border-crossing regimen on both borders.47 Requiring customs authorities to handle the 1891 immigration regulations did not seem unusual, because administering the Chinese exclusion laws had been part of their bailiwick since 1882. Special Chinese inspectors had been working under the supervision of border customs collectors since the 1880s.48 But border customs officials showed little enthusiasm for their new responsibilities under the 1891 immigration law. Throughout the 1890s,

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customs collectors on both borders proved notoriously uninterested in screening potential immigrants. Even those border port customs collectors who had been allocated designated immigration inspectors under the terms of the 1891 act most often detailed them to customs work. In 1899, Commissioner-General Powderly suggested that “the ease with which our Canadian boundary is crossed is due in part to . . . the policy of assigning immigration officers to the supervision and control of collectors of customs,” a practice most prevalent along that border. Customs authorities at Detroit, Niagara Falls, and elsewhere duly collected the inspection certificates given to them by incoming immigrants, but they apparently did little else prior to 1901. They may have occasionally prevented the entry of European immigrants traveling without head-tax certificates, but there is little doubt that they mostly ignored immigration matters. Powderly disapprovingly noted the “comparative unimportance” of immigration law to customs collectors. Collectors remained “ignorant of its provisions” and frequently assigned immigration inspectors to “duties other than those they were appointed to discharge.”49 Admonitory circulars issued from the Treasury Department in 1897 and again in 1900 further suggest that border customs officials made a habit of disregarding their immigration duties. In each, Washington-based officials took pains to remind border customs authorities of their responsibilities under immigration law. In September 1897, Commissioner-General of Immigration T. V. Powderly dedicated a departmental circular to reminding “Collectors of Customs on the Canadian and Mexican frontiers” that they “constituted ex-officio Commissioners of Immigration, and [were] charged with the execution of Immigration and Alien Contract-Labor Laws within their respective districts.” They were to cover, with their available force of inspectors, “all points of entrance into their respective districts from foreign territory, for the purpose of enforcement of said laws.”50 His reprimand appears to have had little effect. Three years later, Congress consolidated administration of the Chinese exclusion laws, primarily entrusted to customs officers, with the administration of the general immigration statutes. In noting that shift, the acting secretary of the treasury provided a terse restatement of established policy on border inspections generally: “Collectors of customs on the Mexican and Canadian frontiers, and at all ports where commissioner of immigration are not employed, are charged within their respective districts with the execution of the laws pertaining to immigration.”51 The failure of customs collectors to enforce immigration laws to the satisfaction of the Bureau of Immigration, coupled with the fact that many

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immigrants simply dodged the Canadian seaport inspection program, led directly to the creation of a centralized border inspection force on the Canadian border in 1901.52 Beginning in September 1901, the Bureau of Immigration thoroughly reorganized its administration of the Canadian border. It appointed a veteran inspector, Robert Watchorn, as a supervising inspector for the Canadian border, with authority to place “on a uniform basis and under one management all the inspectors” operating between the Michigan port of entry south of Sault St. Marie, Ontario, in the west and Eastport, Maine, in the east. Watchorn spent the next several months trying to institute order on the “chaotic” inspection conditions then prevailing on the line. After visits to various ports of entry along the line he concluded that “every inspector has his own way of enforcing the law,” resulting in complete “want of system and lack of anything approaching adequacy of inspection.” He identified several ports of entry with no immigration inspection whatsoever and appointed inspectors to monitor them. At the same time, he introduced new methods of inspection at all ports.53 Over the course of nine months, Watchorn managed to instill a greater sense of consistency of inspections along the international boundary. By June 1902 he was able to report that “not a train or boat on any railroad or regularly chartered boat route enters the United States in this jurisdiction without being inspected.” A force of forty-four inspectors, supplemented by physicians and clerks, conducted inspections at all but two of the railroad crossings points on the border.54 As a result of the new inspection system, he wrote in 1902, “not a day has passed during this year without one or more alien immigrants being removed from a train or boat and returned to Canada, or deported to Europe.” For fiscal year 1902, inspectors examined 4,985 immigrants who had eluded seaport inspection by giving Canadian destinations. An overwhelming majority of these had arrived in Canada within the previous thirty days, suggesting that they had, in fact, intentionally misstated their intended destinations.55 Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe, Syrians, Armenians, and Italians predominated. Of the 4,985 migrants inspected, 2,028 were debarred, 812 as paupers, 496 for “loathsome and contagious disease,” and 419 as contract laborers. Remarkably, the exclusions effected at Canadian ports of entry in 1901–1902 exceeded the total exclusions at all other U.S. ports of entry combined for the same period.56 Robert Watchorn’s 1902 report to the commissioner-general, and his congressional testimony in the summer of 1902, confirmed the existence



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of the migration routes authorities had long suspected. Behind the pattern of illicit immigration lay a transnational network of “unscrupulous” steamship agents, ethnic guides, and professional smugglers who coached immigrants along the route. Despite the encouraging success his new inspection regime had achieved in terms of exclusions, however, Watchorn understood that the Bureau of Immigration had only altered the nature of the problem. Illicit entry would not go away. In the face of new port of entry inspections, immigrants and the smuggling networks they relied on simply shifted their strategies. They abandoned the railroads and sought alternative routes. Recognizing this, Watchorn estimated in his 1902 report that upward of 1,000 immigrant aliens had been successfully smuggled into the United States surreptitiously during the year.57 In fact, the practice of smuggling, understood more narrowly as surreptitious entry, no doubt rose considerably during the first year of Watchorn’s administration. Before the 1901 reforms, it took little effort to dodge inspections at even the more heavily traveled routes, and practically no effort to cross elsewhere. But, as a result of Watchorn’s work, immigrants did in fact find the Canadian route more challenging after 1902. Once landed in Canada, immigrants still fell into the care of “guides.” Where guides had previously specialized in leading immigrants to unguarded railroad routes or “coaching” them as they passed through other ports of entry, they now led immigrants to unofficial crossing points. The expertise of local border experts became increasingly important. Such border smugglers specialized in bringing in aliens “by wagons or by boats over routes widely apart from regularly appointed and well-guarded places of entry.”58 Still, Watchorn and his forces made their presence felt in their first year of operation. In addition to their inspection work at the ports of entry, they endeavored to patrol suspected smuggling points along the border. They captured and prosecuted nine smugglers in fiscal year 1902, and Watchorn appeared optimistic that smuggling networks could be undermined.59 One sign of the new regime’s effectiveness was the fact that smugglers shifted their smuggling work ever westward.60 Watchorn reported that, by late 1901, “there went over the borders of Dakota more European immigrants without medical examination than went over the whole border east of the Sault with examination, showing that as fast as you tighten it up in the east they go west and find a way around.” Watchorn told a Senate committee in 1902 that “the smugglers know the business better than we know it, and of course we have to watch what they do and



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then take counter measures to meet them.” Plans were already afoot to place the western portion of the border under the administrative direction of an inspector in Vancouver.61 Watchorn’s efforts on the eastern Canadian border were but one aspect of administrative reforms occurring along the Canadian boundary. At the same time that Watchorn’s force tackled the problem of illicit European immigration patterns, inspectors in the Chinese Division were succeeding in stemming the flow of Chinese workers across the northern border. After Canada had imposed a $500 head tax on Chinese entering the country in 1903, the Canadian route became more cost prohibitive for smugglers. The Canadian smuggling situation was further improved, from the point of view of American authorities, after the commissionergeneral of immigration signed an agreement in 1903 with the Canadian Pacific Railway Company. Under that agreement the railroad was obliged to bring all U.S.-bound Chinese immigrants directly from the Vancouver seaport to one of four designated ports of entry for Chinese on the U.S. border. This arrangement intended to deprive immigrants of the opportunity to engage the services of the smuggling rings centered in Montreal. By 1906, Bureau of Immigration officials had noted a steep decline in Chinese smuggling through Canada, and declared it had “the Canadianborder situation well in hand.”62

Enforcement Visions and the Mexican Border: The Immigration Act of 1903 Reforms along the Canadian border—in particular the new enforcement regime pioneered by Robert Watchorn—had two profound repercussions that would shape developments on the Mexican border after 1902. First and most directly, greater enforcement success in Canada led immigrants and smugglers to prefer routes through Mexico. It was no accident that smuggling of European, Asian, and Syrian immigrants across the Mexican border began to blossom at the very moment that the Canadian route became more difficult. Experience with Chinese smugglers in the 1880s and 1890s led Bureau of Immigration officials to acknowledge that having the Canadian border situation “well in hand” meant the Mexican border would soon become the site of more extensive smuggling. While the annual reports of the commissioner-general of immigration had made little reference to immigration through Mexico prior to 1900, reports in subsequent years consistently highlighted such immigration as an emerging problem.63 By 1906 the Bureau of Immigration had grown alarmed by the

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adoption of Mexico as “a place of temporary sojourn and transshipment by both European and Asiatic aliens.”64 The next chapter addresses the elaboration of these Mexican smuggling routes in the 1900s. Second, Watchorn’s reports from Canada in important ways shaped ideas about the border and border enforcement policies as they came to be encapsulated in the Immigration Act of 1903. Watchorn’s rather impressive claims for the success of a border inspection system came just as the Bureau of Immigration was pressing Congress to radically revise its approach to immigration law enforcement. A bill destined to become the Immigration Act of 1903 had been introduced in the House of Representatives in 1901. The bill, drafted by the commissioner-general’s office and authored by the chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, was referred to as the “Industrial Commission bill” because it embodied many of the reforms that special commission had suggested in its 1901 report. In addition to enacting the new immigration restrictions discussed earlier, the act proposed to codify the welter of immigration laws enacted since 1875. Most important from the point of view of the bureau, it proposed to raise the head tax from $1 to $1.50 in order to expand the enforcement budget of the Bureau. It would also apply the head tax to aliens entering via U.S. land borders.65 At the same time, it dropped the provision from the 1882 law that tied port expenditures to port head-tax income. Instead, under the terms of the law, the immigrant fund generated by head taxes would become a permanent appropriation, from which the secretary of commerce and labor could draw for all enforcement activities, seaport and land.66 In essence, the bill would provide a level of funding more adequate to the problems of administration, especially border administration. Practically speaking, it meant salaries for border inspectors and funds for the development of border detention facilities.67 As debate over the bill progressed from the spring of 1902 through the following winter, Watchorn emerged as a star witness for the bill’s supporters. His June 1902 report to the commissioner-general, supplemented by his testimony before congressional committees, provided data vital to the argument that the United States ought to substantially revise its approach to border enforcement. First, Watchorn’s testimony validated the need for better enforcement by providing the most solid evidence to date of substantial and well-organized borderland smuggling activities. The Industrial Commission had reported in 1901 that “in proportion to the efficiency of the inspection and deportation of immigrants at the seaports of the United States, those classes liable to be debarred naturally seek back

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entrances” through Canada and Mexico.68 But Watchorn’s careful record of transborder crossings since September 1901 documented the volume of this traffic and provided irrefutable evidence that large numbers of excludable aliens attempted to enter the United States by way of Canada. Second, Watchorn’s report and testimony justified the creation of a dedicated border inspection force by carefully documenting the efficacy of his newly fashioned border administration. The remarkably high rejection rates achieved by inspectors posted at Montreal and border ports of entry, coupled with their successful prosecution of smugglers, suggested that a bureau with sufficient manpower could solve the problem of illicit entry. The smuggling problem was widespread, he argued, but not beyond effective control. Watchorn’s testimony capped a strong lobbying effort by the Bureau of Immigration. The bureau had acknowledged the problem of a Canadian leak throughout the 1890s, but only after 1900 did it begin arguing for additional funding in order to create a border inspection force. Intellectually, the argument for border enforcement crystallized in the commissioner-general’s annual report of 1902, released in the midst of debate over the immigration bill before Congress. “The strength practically of the guard established on our boundaries, land and water,” Sargent wrote ominously in June 1902, “is little better than that at its weakest point.”69 Accepting that proposition—and acknowledging that the borders remained the weakest points—meant committing as a nation to the cost of border enforcement. The bureau found an unlikely ally in A. S. Anderson, the Philadelphia agent of the American line of the International Navigation Company. Anderson labored intensely to ensure that the 1903 act would lead to a credible system of border inspection on the U.S. land borders. Anderson was eager to undermine the steerage market of competing steamship lines, which had developed a market niche in bringing “rejected” aliens to Canada. He believed that the current laws and regulations—which assessed penalties on steamship lines bringing in excludable aliens, but not on railroads—unfairly benefited firms bringing immigrants by way of Canada. To support his demand for better border inspection, Anderson undertook a detailed analysis of the Bureau of Immigration’s enforcement problems on the Canadian border and presented it to the Senate Committee on Immigration. Limiting the number of immigration inspectors to one per customs district may have appeared fiscally responsible in 1891, he argued, but a decade later it appeared foolish. It must be “apparent to the dullest mind,” Anderson continued, “that one inspector to each customs district

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would make even the faintest inspection impossible.” Anderson framed the issue of border enforcement even more compellingly than Watchorn: “Until the land borders are guarded it is useless, and worse than useless, to add to the classes of aliens who shall be refused a landing at the seaports,” Anderson testified. “The control of immigration via Canada and Mexico is an exceedingly difficult problem,” he acknowledged, but the alternative was worse. If it failed to properly provide for the enforcement of the land borders in the 1903 legislation, Anderson argued, Congress might just as well repeal all extant immigration restrictions.70 But for all the focus on current and proposed border enforcement efforts in the debates over the 1903 act, there remained a fundamental fuzziness over what a proper border inspection system might look like or be expected to achieve. Senators and members of the House in fact posed few hard questions. Could immigration across the borders be regulated as successfully as at the maritime seaports? How large a force of inspectors would be required to satisfactorily solve the border problem? What exactly might constitute a solution? Watchorn himself seemed to vacillate on the issue of how well a well-staffed border inspection force could be expected to perform. At some points, Watchorn suggested that increased manpower on the borders would allow the Bureau of Immigration to replicate the success of the maritime inspection ports. “We purpose putting it all [inspections] on a uniform basis and making it equally difficult for a European to enter the United States at any point, no matter where it is,” he told a Senate committee. Questioned about the difficulty of battling smugglers along the vast border, Watchorn maintained that the service could, given “enough men,” mount an “efficient protection” against smuggling.71 Elsewhere, however, particularly in his June 1902 report to the commissioner-general, Watchorn acknowledged the uncomfortable fact that substantial leaks continued to occur despite the new Canadian border inspection system. For instance, while he and his officers inspected almost 5,000 immigrants along the Canadian border in fiscal year 1902, he estimated that at least another 1,000 eluded inspection altogether. His report also had highlighted the vast, remote nature of the border and the fact that professional smugglers “know every opening along the line” separating the United States and Canada. His testimony frankly acknowledged the dynamic by which smugglers invariably invented successful schemes to counter enforcement innovations.72 No doubt Watchorn harbored doubts about the degree to which the land border could ever be administered with the same rigor possible at Ellis Island and the seaports.

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That he understood the situations differed substantially is suggested by the fact that he believed the Bureau of Immigration ought to conceive of border inspection service as a unique type of work within the bureau. “None but young, intelligent, vigorous, active men should be assigned to duty therein,” he wrote to the commissioner in June 1902. “Men who can endure the hardship of long and tiresome train journeys and long night watches, as well as able physically to cope with smugglers and bands of immigrants eagerly bent on entering the United States regardless of lawful prohibitions.”73 Although he never used the term “deterrence,” Robert Watchorn’s testimony seemed to suggest that the creation of a credible inspection and patrol force could in fact only hope to deter the growth of smuggling operations. Despite the inconsistency of his vision regarding successful border enforcement, Watchorn maintained an optimistic outlook that lawmakers do not seem to have questioned. Understandably, Watchorn, Sargent, and their colleagues in the Bureau of Immigration seemed less concerned with exploring the future costs and hypothetical implications of a commitment to border enforcement. They simply felt a need—an urgent need—to fortify the border in the face of widespread illicit entry.74 Most lawmakers, more interested in the bill’s restrictive provisions, seemed content to accept the argument that better resources for enforcement needed to accompany any expanded restrictions. In the legislation that created an American commitment to border enforcement, lawmakers never explored the extent to which the border could be sealed against illicit entry. In part, congressional willingness to vastly expand the size of the Bureau of Immigration may have been attributable to the manner in which proponents of border inspections framed the issue. When the issue was presented as a choice between enforcing current immigration law or condoning illicit entry, the correct vote no doubt seemed obvious. At the same time, congressional debate records suggest that at least some congressmen supported the bill’s provision for border inspections because they misapprehended the existing situation. For instance, in Senate debate over the bill, proponents greatly exaggerated the degree to which the Canadian border remained unguarded. It was a “dangerous fact,” in the words of one senator, that uninspected entry from Canada was an “easy thing.”75 Repeated claims that the Canadian and Mexican borders at present stood virtually wide open reinforced the belief that sufficient manpower could solve the border problem. The truth of the matter was somewhat more ambiguous. Even where inspections existed, substantial smuggling endured. But that fact was lost amid discussions of the bill.

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In truth, discussing the border lent itself to a sort of Manichean simplicity of either/or. Much of the rhetoric, eschewing ambiguities, lent itself to the belief that the problems of the border might be overcome with the proper application of force. In the steamship agent Anderson’s testimony, the border stretched beyond metaphor to fable as he mocked Congressional inaction on the problem of “backdoor” entry: A man who had valuable treasures in his house had his front door guarded by a giant armed with a gun, sword, and pistols, but he left the care of his back door to a small boy with no weapons but his bare hands. When the man found that his treasure was being taken he called together his sons and his steward, and after explaining the precautions he had taken to guard the doors he asked their advice as to what further action should be taken. They all advised that he put more armed men at the front door.76

When it was presented in this fashion, who could disapprove of efforts to develop a better guard for the United States’s “back doors”? The bureau lobbied furiously for the bill and especially for those provisions related to the borders. While congressmen focused on controversies related to the introduction of a literacy test clause, Watchorn and other border officials stressed that the administrative reform of border entry was the “crucial point” of the whole bill. When substantial differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill threatened its passage in early 1903, Commissioner-General Sargent made a passionate appeal to the Senate immigration committee: It is a matter of serious interest to this country that we should have this bill, and that we should have the means of carrying on the work. We want more men in our service, and the best type of men we can get, in order that we may effectually guard the entire border of our country, north and south. We have got to do it, and we must have the means.

Sargent asked that they be willing to sacrifice the bill’s provision for a literacy test, which the Senate version included, for the sake of getting the rest of the bill enacted.77 A joint conference committee did in fact reconcile differences between the two versions of the bill, and the Bureau of Immigration received the substantial reforms that it sought. In its final form, the bill doubled the head tax from $1 to $2, effectively doubling the budget of the Bureau of Immigration. For the first time, the law applied the head tax to aliens crossing into the United States from “foreign contiguous territory,”

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thus increasing the likelihood of effective scrutiny by border inspectors. (Canadian and Mexican citizens continued to be exempted from the head tax.) The bill also provided new tools for battling illicit entry, including penalties for smuggling and illegal entry. In effect, Watchorn’s Canadian border work—which had made illicit entry more difficult but had boosted organized smuggling efforts and redirected smugglers to more remote portions of the Canadian and Mexican border—did not lead to a critical assessment of border enforcement problems. Instead, it ensured a national commitment to further fortifying the borders against smuggling.78

Growing Federal Resources on the Border In the wake of the 1903 law, the principal attention of Bureau of Immigration officials shifted to the Mexican border, where a polyglot assortment of immigrants, many redirected from Canada, were making their way across the border into the southwestern United States. The means for enforcement of the restrictions on the Mexican border grew steadily after the reorganization of the bureau in 1903. From at least 1896 on, the bureau had received an annual appropriation of $100,000 to enforce on the Mexican and Canadian borders the contract labor law and the prohibitions on convicts, idiots, and those deemed likely to become public charges. The money went to salaries and the cost of deporting violators. The 1896 annual report of the commissioner-general noted the presence of contract labor inspectors in the Mexican border towns of El Paso and Laredo, but the little resources available remained focused on Canadian ports.79 The inspectors working on the Mexican border do not appear to have been employed full-time or particularly active. Before the passage of the 1903 Immigration Act, the bureau had attempted to increase its forces on the Mexican line and had experimented with using horse-mounted inspectors to ride along the international line.80 But in fact the federal presence on the southern boundary remained nominal until 1903. Thereafter, with greater financial resources available under the 1903 law, the bureau took immediate steps to further bolster the southern border. The swelling number of non-Mexican immigrants crossing the border after 1902 coincided with an upsurge in the transborder migration of Mexican workers into the United States.81 Together they led to a decisive expansion of inspection facilities and inspection officers. The Bureau of Immigration more than doubled the number of official ports of entry on the Mexican border during the first three years of the new century. In his 1900 annual report, the commissioner-general of immigration noted

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only three official ports of entry on the Mexican border—at El Paso and Eagle Pass in Texas and at Nogales, Arizona. Four years later, presumably in response to the dramatically increased traffic, additional ports of entry had been established at Naco, Arizona, as well as at Del Rio, Eagle Pass, Laredo, and Brownsville, in Texas.82 In 1904 the Bureau of Immigration supplemented its port-of-entry immigration inspectors by introducing a force of mounted inspectors, approaching seventy-five men, who routinely patrolled portions of the Mexican border on horseback.83 By 1906, the bureau maintained eleven stations on the border.84 Just two years later, the secretary of the treasury reported that the Bureau of Immigration maintained twenty-one border inspection stations along the Mexican border, the principal ones at Laredo, Eagle Pass, and El Paso.85 To complement this phenomenal growth of inspectors, patrol guards, and inspection facilities along the southern boundary, Bureau of Immigration officials sought to develop a seaport inspection system analogous to that introduced at Canadian seaports in 1893. Although the seaport inspection program in Canada ultimately had proven ineffective in intercepting excludable U.S.-bound immigrants and been supplemented with a border force in 1901, officials kept the program in place into the 1900s. The inspection system did have the merit of enabling the bureau to introduce port-of-entry inspections in a manner consistent with the statutory requirement that such inspections disrupt normal border commerce as little as possible. Inspecting at least some U.S.-bound immigrants at Canadian seaports alleviated the need for time-consuming inspections at the border, where inspectors were pressed by smaller detention facilities, a substantial traffic of nonimmigrant passengers, and the exigencies of railroad schedules. Apparently, officials sought the same convenience along the Mexican border. Beginning in early 1903, bureau officials wrote to Mexican railroad officials to explore their interest in pursuing an agreement relative to the seaport inspection of U.S.-bound aliens. But by 1908, an agreement still eluded American officials. American consular officials in Mexico City, who had been dutifully pressing the interests of the Department of Commerce and Labor for the agreement, remained lukewarm to the idea in 1908. Their reluctance to press the case further appears to have arisen from their estimation that matters of sovereignty, especially with regard to the United States, remained prickly in Mexico. At the same time, a financial crisis in Mexico was contributing to fears of political instability. A cryptic April 1908 telegram from the American ambassador in Mexico City to the secretary of state concluded that it “would be a mistake to,

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at this time at least, suggest to the Mexican Government that American Officers be stationed at Mexican ports or interior points.” The embassy picked the matter up again in December 1908, but no further progress emerged.86 In the midst of increasing political instability in Mexico, the proposal foundered. The failure to reach an agreement for seaport inspections with Mexico meant that immigration officers along the Mexican border faced a more daunting task than their colleagues to the north. Without a system of seaport inspections to act as a first line of defense, the land ports at which they were stationed came under far more intense pressure. As they sorted the admissible from the inadmissible and attempted to develop an effective system of inspection and patrol, they encountered a bewildering array of smuggling schemes. The Mexican border experience—even before the advent of substantial restrictions on the immigration of Mexican nationals themselves—would prove extraordinarily taxing. The period of the 1890s had seen a further elaboration of the dialectical pattern that had first emerged in the 1880s, a pattern in which new restrictions spawned new immigrants and new means of enforcement spawned new routes and means of subversion. By the 1900s, the U.S.-Mexican border had become the surprising new focus of Bureau of Immigration officials. The Canadian leak of the 1890s had become a Mexican leak by the mid-1900s. Of equal importance, the United States had begun drafting the outlines of a resource-intensive border enforcement policy. For a variety of reasons, the problem of illicit immigration across the Mexican border proved less amenable to the sorts of administrative reforms that had transformed the Canadian frontier. As the locus of illicit entry shifted to the border with Mexico after 1900, the intractable nature of border enforcement reemerged with a new clarity. What level of effective control might the Bureau of Immigration’s border inspectors aspire to attain? How successfully could an extensive and remote land border be defended against illicit incursions? Although a 1911 study of American immigration concluded that the administration of immigration laws on the Mexican border was entirely in concert with practices at maritime ports of entry, the realities remained quite distinct.87 The meaning and efficacy of U.S. border enforcement would be contested more thoroughly on the Mexican line than it had been on the Canadian line.



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Er asi ng t h e Li nes: Immigr ant I ngenuit y on t h e U. S .-Mexico Border, 1 895–19 10

Chapter 4

If this Chinese immigration to Mexico continues it will be necessary to run a barb wire fence along our side of the Rio Grande. El Paso Herald-Post, January 1 1, 1904

Between 1891 and 1910, both the scope of federal immigration restrictions and the means for enforcing them on the Mexican and Canadian borders grew tremendously. But while the United States made progress in enforcing immigration restrictions on the Canadian border, progress on the Mexican border was halting at best. The early 1900s witnessed an upsurge in illicit border crossings from Mexico, and not until the 1910 Mexican Revolution interrupted migration patterns did authorities seem capable of stemming the flow of undocumented immigrants through Mexico. For even as the United States began to imagine and put in place the means by which it hoped to create an enforceable line between itself and Mexico, immigrants and smugglers conspired to keep the border permeable. The border was being simultaneously drawn—by the words of politicians and the actions of bureaucrats—and erased—by the words and actions of migrants. From consideration of the growth of restrictive immigration laws and the means for their enforcement, I turn in this chapter to examine the activities of the determined immigrants and smugglers who demonstrated a seemingly inexhaustible creativity in contravening American immigration laws on the Mexican border in the opening decade of this century. Increasing immigration restrictions, a rebounding American economy in the late 1890s, and U.S.-Canadian cooperation on immigration provide the context for understanding the Mexican border’s continued permeability between 1895 and 1910. But at another level lay the widespread inclination of migrants to ignore or defy the border’s authority. This chapter highlights the activities of immigrants and immigrant smuggling rings on the border in the opening decade of the twentieth century. During

this period the border became, at different times, a significant site for the migration of Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Lebanese, and Slavic immigrants. As one looks through the historical record, it becomes evident that ordinary people—and particularly these immigrant workers—ensured that the U.S.-Mexico border would remain functionally permeable during the opening decades of the twentieth century. Immigrants and the borderland smuggling networks that arose to profit from their needs successfully countered the growing manpower, organization, and technology of the Immigration Bureau by cultivating traditions of stealth, deception, and disguise. In researching this phenomenon one encounters some of the same problems that contemporary immigration officials face as they try to estimate the volume of undocumented entries into the United States. In fact, it is impossible. Such immigration occurred for the most part out of sight of official view, and thus generated little documentation. We usually learn about undocumented immigrants when they are intercepted, so we can never speak with any authority of the numbers of undocumented immigrants who succeed in entering the United States. Those unobserved remain uncounted. Second, for the same reason, our understanding of the strategies and methods of undocumented immigrants must remain partial, for only schemes detected by authorities have made it into the historical record. Nonetheless, it is a story that can be traced, if imperfectly. Bureau of Immigration reports from the mid-1900s richly illuminate border smuggling operations and the strategies of aspiring immigrants. This chapter sketches the broad contours of the phenomenon as it existed in the closing years of the nineteenth century and the opening decade of the twentieth century. It seeks to suggest something of the variety of means and methods employed for illicit entry at different points along the vast stretches of the border, as well as the long-term meanings such clandestine crossings acquired for the project of border enforcement. In the years prior to the beginning of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, a polyglot mixture of emigrants from Europe, Asia, and parts of the Ottoman Empire, newly affected by American restrictions, joined the already present Chinese immigrants in pioneering efforts to enter the United States via Mexico. The sudden appearance of so many immigrants on this border with a determination to cross legally or illegally—and their apparent success in doing so—greatly frustrated immigration authorities from Brownsville to San Diego, even as it encouraged others to follow in their wake. The border remained functionally permeable in the 1900s because



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Table 4.1. Legal Immigration to the United States 1890–1909 Year

Total Immigrants

Year

Total Immigrants

1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899

455,302 560,319 579,699 439,730 285,631 258,536 343,267 230,832 229,299 311,715

1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909

448,572 487,918 648,743 857,046 812,870 1,026,499 1,100,735 1,285,349 782,870 1,041,570

Sources: U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1903 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1903), 10; idem, Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1910 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1910), 234.

migrants—perhaps hundreds of thousands of them—dared to cross it illegally. But how did immigrants do so? How did they make the border permeable in an everyday sense? To understand this we need to understand who was coming by way of Mexico, and why.

The Attractions of the Border The years 1901–1910 were peak years for legal immigration to the United States. The severe economic downturn following the Panic of 1893 had led to slackening migration from Europe through the late 1890s. Beginning in 1900, however, immigration again began to rise to pre-1893 levels. And beginning in 1902, it moved well past the half-million mark annually (Table 4.1).1 But not all U.S.-bound immigrants were steaming into Ellis Island or presenting themselves for inspection at other seaports. Paralleling the general rise in the volume of American immigration through official ports of entry was a significant surge in the number of people attempting to enter the country illicitly. In particular, individuals from a variety of different nations had begun, for various reasons, emigrating to Mexico



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and slipping into the United States across its southern boundary. At least one unofficial estimate in the mid-1900s placed the number of annual undocumented entries through Mexico in the tens of thousands.2 Although these undocumented entrants were numerically small in the context of the tremendous flow of immigrants entering the United States during this period, they were tremendously important in the history of American immigration enforcement and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Their presence stimulated the development of a more fully articulated border control regime after 1900 even as their success presaged the impossibility of effective border enforcement. After 1900, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, portions of present-day Lebanon, and Japan joined the long-established stream of Chinese emigrants taking this circuitous route. By 1907 these immigrants had so far succeeded in their efforts to evade American immigration laws that one Immigration Service inspector claimed that immigration through Mexico made a “joke” and “hollow mockery” of immigration laws.3 The cabinet secretary with ultimate responsibility, the secretary of commerce and labor, put the matter more delicately a year later when he complained that “it is impossible to secure, with reference to this immigration, a proper observance of the laws” on the Mexican border.4 In fact, by the early 1900s, border towns on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border had become the temporary homes for a curious admixture of northwardbound immigrants, including Italians, Greeks, Lebanese, Japanese, and Chinese. Smuggling these immigrants across the border had emerged as something of a cottage industry in the small Mexican border towns. Measuring the size of the cross-border immigration flow and the national origins of immigrants along the southern border during this period is difficult. With regard to the volume of migration, the problem is one of insufficient records. First, because no calculation of illegal entries could be made, it is impossible to estimate within any certainty the actual number of immigrants crossing the Mexican border.5 Second, statistics on legal immigration began to be kept only after the 1904 application of the head tax to immigrants crossing U.S. land borders. Prior to 1903, border officials appear to have kept no statistics on immigrant admissions at all. Even after they began reporting statistics on the Mexican border, officials did not report the immigrant aliens by national groups. There is, however, extensive anecdotal evidence that Asian and European immigrants began to enter the United States through Mexico in increasing numbers after 1900. Although Mexican citizens were beginning to cross the border in in

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creasing numbers after 1900, most of the aliens during the opening decade of the century appear to have been non-Mexicans. That supposition is supported by official Bureau of Immigration reports. For instance, in 1901 the commissioner-general of immigration suggested that most of the immigrants rejected at border ports of entry were European, Middle Eastern, or Asian. He interpreted the “large number” of aliens refused entry on the borders in that year as lending “emphasis to the belief . . . that the proscribed classes seek and find an easier means of access to this country across the land borders than at its seaports.”6 Border traffic patterns confirm that the ports of entry on the Mexican border were being kept far busier with non-Mexican immigrants than with Mexican border crossers. For instance, in 1907, officials on the Mexican border district reported admitting 5,214 non-Mexican immigrant aliens and only 2,616 “non-immigrant aliens,” a class that would have consisted principally of head tax–exempt Mexican laborers entering the country temporarily. The flow of European and Asian immigrants dwarfed that of Mexicans.7 Official correspondence from 1907 gives a glimpse of the heterogeneity of that non-Mexican immigrant stream. Between July 1906 and July 1907, of the 5,214 aliens (excluding Mexicans) legally admitted from Mexico into the United States as immigrants, 2,061 were Japanese, 1,360 were Syrian, 886 Spanish, 207 Italian, 126 German, 115 Greek, and the balance were nationals from England, Turkey, France, and elsewhere. In the subsequent six months, a similar mix of nationalities applied for admission through Mexico, although now significant numbers of Russian, Polish, and Bulgarian emigrants also appeared.8 Chinese immigrants, who represented one of the more active groups attempting entry through Mexico, did not appear in these figures because at that time, Chinese nationals, even those claiming to be admissible as merchants or other members of the exempt class, could not apply for admission along the Mexican border. They were, however, heavily represented in Mexican borderland cities and constituted a large number of illicit immigrants. That the Mexican border witnessed a dramatic increase in non-Mexican immigration during the opening decade of the century would not in itself have been a problem for federal immigration officials. To their minds, the problem lay in what they suspected was a far greater number of excludable aliens from Europe and Asia entering surreptitiously. After all, it was not, in the words of one official, the “fascination of a longer sea voyage which induced them” to adopt this route. It was the fact that the Mexican border had now assumed the attraction of the Canadian border in the mid-1890s: it was effectively wide open.9

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The border’s attraction was dual. Most Lebanese, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants pressing at the southern border either knew or believed they were excludable under American immigration law; they were therefore attracted by the notion that they might encounter less rigorous inspection on the remote Mexican border, where the routines of inspections had only recently been introduced. At the same time, the position of these inspection sites along the international border circumscribed the authority of American officials. If efforts at legal entry failed, Mexican soil provided a safe staging area for illegal entry “a few miles to the right or to the left, of the particular Immigrant Station” from which they had been rejected. Like the Chinese immigrants who had begun crossing Canadian and Mexican borders in the 1880s, these migrants were attracted too by the fact that the physical and cultural geography of the borderlands made surreptitious entry possible.10 While the exact number of undocumented entrants was unknowable, officials considered the number of such aliens to be “very great” and “more than equal the number of those lawfully admitted” along the border.11 An American immigration inspector conducting investigations on smuggling through Mexico in 1906 and 1907 estimated that of all the migrants from Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and Asia who annually entered the United States from Mexico, only about one in ten submitted themselves for examination on crossing the border. The balance sought illicit entry, either on their own or, more commonly, with the aid of smugglers.12 All told, he estimated that 15,000 aliens from Europe and Asia were entering the United States annually through Mexico.13 While they shared the hope of successful passage through Mexico into the United States, the emigrants adopting this route were in many ways diverse. Different technical requirements and constraints in American immigration law propelled Chinese, Japanese, European, and Lebanese immigrants to inundate the Mexican border after 1900, and the nature of these restrictions partially dictated the strategies they pursued in getting across the border. To understand their impact on the Mexican border requires consideration of the particularities of their journeys.

The Chinese on the Mexican Border The presence of aspiring Chinese migrants along the border was not new, but the volume of traffic had increased considerably since the early 1890s. The Chinese Six Companies continued to coordinate the traffic in contraband migrants, perhaps handling almost 90 percent of the illegal

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traffic during this period. Demand for their service continued apace in the 1890s and 1900s, as Congress extended the Chinese exclusion laws for ten years in 1892 and again, indefinitely, in 1902.14 But after Canada imposed a $100 head tax on Chinese entering the country in 1901, the Canadian route became more cost prohibitive for smugglers. As noted in the previous chapter, the Canadian smuggling situation was further improved, from the point of view of American authorities, after the commissionergeneral of immigration signed an agreement in 1903 with the Canadian Pacific Railway Company. Under that agreement, U.S.-bound Chinese immigrants landing at Vancouver were forced to take the railroad to one of four designated ports of entry for Chinese on the U.S. border, thus depriving themselves of the opportunity of engaging the smuggling rings centered in Montreal. By 1906 Bureau of Immigration officials believed Chinese smuggling through Canada to be on the wane.15 But in a dynamic that would become an axiomatic feature of immigration border enforcement, a “solution” somewhere created a “problem” elsewhere. To the surprise of seemingly no one in immigration enforcement, what waned on the northern border waxed on the southern. Indeed, officials fully expected that the Mexican border would be the “next point of attack” by Chinese smugglers. “Having been practically defeated at every turn along the Canadian frontier,” the bureau reported in 1906, “the Chinamen who desire to enter this country are now turning their attention more than ever to the opportunity afforded by the natural conditions existing along our southern frontier.”16 The adoption of the Mexican route for Chinese smuggling was aided by the signing of a Sino-Mexican treaty of commerce in 1899 that permitted free and voluntary migration between the countries. Direct steamship service between Hong Kong and Mexican ports followed in 1903. In 1900, the resident Chinese population of Mexico remained tiny, perhaps numbering 2,500. But eight years later almost 60,000 Chinese had emigrated to Mexico.17 As early as 1907, there were no legal ports of entry on the Mexican border for Chinese aliens, even those technically permitted to enter the United States. To cut down on fraud, U.S. authorities had designated only certain ports for the processing of Chinese migrants, and no ports on the Mexican border were so designated.18 But American authorities correctly suspected that considerable numbers, probably thousands, of the Chinese who entered Mexico eventually continued on to the United States. In fact, of the 60,000 Chinese who had emigrated to Mexico by 1908, fewer than 12,000 probably still resided in Mexico by that time, and only a very small fraction had booked passage back to China. The rest, in all likelihood, had

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entered the United States.19 Without accurate figures on Chinese immigration to Mexico or the Chinese population in Mexico, authorities at the time had to rely on anecdotal evidence. Much of that evidence came from the investigations of Bureau of Immigration investigators sent into Mexico in 1906 to investigate Chinese smuggling through Mexico. After extensive investigation in Mexico, Immigration Inspector Marcus Braun declared that most Chinese “come to Mexico with no intention to remain there but because they think they can enter the United States in an easy way.”20 A banker in the Mexican port city of Guaymas, Sonora, told Braun in 1906 that approximately 20,000 Chinese had entered the state in the past several years, but that fewer than 4,000 could still be found there. Observation of Chinese workers landing in Mexico deepened Braun’s suspicions that most had gone to the United States: “On their arrival in Mexico, I found them to be provided with United States money, not Mexican coins; they had in their possession Chinese-English dictionaries; I found them in possession of Chinese-American newspapers and of American Railroad Maps.”21 Observing one group of over 100 Chinese arriving at Guaymas for railroad contract work in Mexico, he noted “probably 200 letters from the United States being distributed among the newly arrived Chinese.” The following day he discovered almost all of these Chinese had booked passage to Magdalena, Sonora, “a small Mexican settlement near the Arizona border line.”22 The phenomenon of Chinese immigration spanned the border, but principally occurred at points extending west from El Paso. In El Paso during the mid-1900s, the size of the resident Chinese community stayed relatively constant, yet each month over 100 Chinese purchased transportation to the interior United States from El Paso. “When it is recalled that there are no ports of entry on the Mexican border through which Chinese may lawfully be admitted,” El Paso immigration officials concluded in 1907, “the inference that they have entered surreptitiously is irresistible.” Authorities also knew that smugglers secreted still more Chinese away in sealed railroad freight cars leaving El Paso.23 Surreptitious Chinese migration across the southwestern U.S. border with Mexico continued to be the defining problem from the viewpoint of American immigration authorities, and the increased volume of traffic at the turn of the century seemed to suggest its intractable nature. “If this Chinese immigration to Mexico continues,” the El Paso Herald-Post presciently editorialized in January 1904, “it will be necessary to run a barb wire fence along our side of the Rio Grande.”24



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Japanese on the Border Undocumented Chinese migration across the Mexican border after 1900 was not a new phenomenon, but one of a decidedly expanding nature. On the other hand, the migration of large numbers of Japanese workers represented a new development. Japanese men had been working on Hawaiian sugar plantations since the 1880s, and began to immigrate to the United States in large numbers beginning in the 1890s. Most of the migrants were single men who intended to work for three or four years in the United States before returning to Japan. Between 1891 and 1900, 27,982 Japanese entered the mainland United States. After 1900, the flow swelled. Between 1900 and 1907, 108,163 had been admitted. But by the early 1900s, Pacific coast workers and politicians were baiting the Japanese as another “Asian menace” and calling for immigration restrictions.25 Up until the 1907 agreement between the United States and Japan that curtailed Japanese labor migration, Japanese were subject only to the same general immigration requirements used to screen other non-Chinese immigrants. Those deemed healthy, unlikely to become public charges, and not under contract were generally admissible. The Japanese government, consciously attempting to avoid the intense antagonism that had greeted Chinese immigrants in the previous decades, strictly regulated emigration of its nationals to the United States. It took steps to ensure that emigrants were neither destitute nor illiterate. To avoid the stigmas of prostitution, gambling, and drunkenness among Japanese nationals in the United States, it encouraged the migration of women and family formation.26 Still, immigration authorities debarred significant numbers of the Japanese who arrived after 1897. Many Japanese immigrants reportedly suffered from trachoma, which was widespread in the wake of the RussoJapanese War. Although some immigrants took steps to receive treatment before sailing, others inevitably arrived at American seaports in an infected condition.27 More commonly, however, Bureau of Immigration inspectors debarred Japanese as potential paupers or under their interpretation of the provisions of the contract labor law. The popular notion that Japanese workers were simply another form of the Chinese “coolie” seems to have influenced immigration officials at San Francisco and elsewhere along the Pacific coast. They regarded with extreme skepticism the contractual role that Japanese emigration companies played in the migration process, interpreting the fact that Japanese immigrants invariably arrived



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with almost exactly the same amount of money as evidence that they were provided “show money” to disguise their actual poverty. Similarly, authorities read the well-organized ethnic support network, through which arriving Japanese would be directed by their countrymen to employment opportunities, as evidence that workers arrived under some sort of illegal labor contract.28 To avoid being debarred as contract labor, migrant advice literature in the 1900s warned Japanese migrants to carefully avoid carrying letters of introduction or even the addresses of Japanese in the United States, either of which might be twisted by American officials into proof of a preexisting work contract.29 The rigorous scrutiny under which Japanese nationals arrived in the United States might partially explain why, even before the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement cut off direct migration of Japanese workers to the United States, Japanese workers had been habitually using other routes into the United States. One clear advantage land border routes had over the direct route through San Francisco was that they offered the option of clandestine entry for those who had been or feared being deemed inadmissible. The Mexican route seems to have been particularly attractive. Between July 1906 and July 1907, Japanese immigrants represented the largest non-Mexican alien group presenting for inspection at the El Paso port of entry, with over 2,000 admitted. An agent of a Japanese emigration company that brought workers under contract to Mexico complained in 1906 that 80 percent of the workers he imported deserted almost immediately on arrival, headed for California. In June 1907 the Mexican Coal and Coke Company complained that 1,400 of the 1,500 Japanese contract laborers for whom it had paid passage to Mexico had broken their contracts and gone to the United States.30 American investigators claimed that upward of 10,000 Japanese had entered Mexico between 1905 and 1907, but that fewer than 1,000 remained resident in that country. But the Mexican route had another shining attraction for the Japanese migrant: subsidized passage. The American anti-contract labor law specifically prohibited prospective employers from paying the passage of workers, but the practice was permitted in Mexico. So Japanese workers could enter into a contract for work in Mexico and have their transPacific passage paid. Labor contractors in Mexico and American immigration authorities seem to have arrived at the same conclusion regarding the real purpose of these arrangements: Japanese workers booked passage to Mexico under contract “with the distinct and prearranged plan to avail themselves of the opportunity of being brought to the North American



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Continent at the expense of ‘somebody else’ and then leave this ‘somebody else’ in the lurch and cross over into the United States.”31 Thus, differences between American and Mexican law created the attraction for Japanese workers to use the Mexican route in the first place. Given that this migration pattern existed before 1907, it is not surprising that many Japanese migrants after 1907 (the year Japan agreed to limit the number of passports it issued for emigration to the United States) began migrating to Mexico with the intention of slipping into the United States. In February 1907 a Bureau of Immigration circular promulgated the order of President Roosevelt barring the admission of Japanese migrants who lacked passports for passage to the United States. Now, if they held passports indicating permission to emigrate to Mexico rather than the United States, Japanese entering from Mexico were turned away at the border. By March, border authorities at El Paso were turning away Japanese applicants at a rate of 500 per month. With the border officially closed, attempts by Japanese to legally cross the border plummeted, and smuggling flourished.32 And the problem was not confined to the southern boundary. Reports of widespread Japanese smuggling across the Canadian border in the American Northwest followed the new restrictions on the Japanese. In response, the Bureau of Immigration dispatched additional officers to Washington State in late 1907. The Gentlemen’s Agreement, according to one press report, had “had no appreciable effect on Japanese immigration” across the boundary. Frank Sargent, chief of the Bureau, intimated that the problem might require him to ask for the assistance of the War Department to prevent illegal passage.33

A Lebanese Stream Alongside this older but expanding stream of migrants from Asia appeared a substantial stream of emigrants from the Mount Lebanon region of Ottoman-controlled Syria. Immigration from Lebanon had first begun in the 1890s. Like the Japanese, most migrants were single men planning a brief sojourn in the United States in order to accumulate money and return home. Almost all who came initially worked as peddlers, packpeddling merchandise on rural and urban routes controlled by Lebanese merchants throughout the United States. Between 1899 and 1907, the Bureau of Immigration reported that 41,404 “Syrians” had been admitted, the overwhelming majority of whom came from the Lebanon region. The



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actual number of immigrants was undoubtedly higher, because significant smuggling across the Canadian and Mexican border had been a regular feature of Lebanese immigration from the 1890s on.34 Like the Chinese, Lebanese smugglers appear to have abandoned the Canadian route after 1902 because of improved American enforcement efforts on the Canadian line. By 1907, U.S. officials estimated that as many as 4,000 Lebanese immigrated to the United States clandestinely via Mexico annually.35 Marcus Braun, the immigration inspector who conducted an undercover investigation of smuggling through Mexico in 1906, found the Mexican route favored by those Lebanese “whose physic would positively be found below the standard set by our laws, and who therefore would surely be rejected did they knock at our Atlantic and other portals and ask admission.”36 In fact, Lebanese at this time were being disproportionately rejected at Ellis Island and other ports of entry because of diagnoses of trachoma and favus, and many of those passing through Mexico do appear to have taken the Mexican route ostensibly to avoid medical inspection. But rejection for “pauperism” or as contract labor was even more common for “Syrians” before 1901. That many of these Lebanese immigrants coming through Mexico suffered some excludable condition is suggested by the fact that, in 1907, one in three who actually applied for admission along the border was debarred, an astoundingly high rejection rate compared to other groups.37 But sources suggest that a good many of the Lebanese had simply been ill-advised to take the Mexican route by countrymen with a financial interest in routing them through Mexico. Like many European and Asian immigrants, Lebanese migrants aspiring to enter the United States frequently relied on networks of countrymen at all stages of their journey. Some networks appear to have specialized in facilitating illicit entry. At least one network stretched from the port at Beirut through the ports of Naples, Havre, and Marseilles and on to Veracruz, Mexico City, and up to the United States border. After the Canadian route became too risky, Syrians with an interest in the Mexican route worked assiduously to steer migrants through Veracruz. Although many of these migrants might have passed easily enough into the United States, they had been led to believe that it was better to go through Mexico, that medical inspections were less rigorous on the U.S.-Mexico border, and that passage from Veracruz to New York City could be had quite cheaply.38 Capturing this stream of U.S.-bound migrants was one sideline of what was essentially a network of hoteliers, saloon keepers, and merchants in Mexico. In the eyes of American immigration authorities, smuggling

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rings functioned simply to make a profit from their emigrant countrymen. “While in appearance they seem to be helping the Syrians to get to the United States,” wrote an American investigator, they were actually “throwing every possible obstacle in their way to induce them to stay in Mexico. They exploit them as peddlers. Those who insist on going on, [the padrone] divests of as much cash as possible and sends them down the line.”39 Chain migration reinforced the efforts of this network, as immigrants successful in entering through Mexico suggested the route to friends and relatives.40

Immigrants from Europe Finally, the Mexican border also became a magnet for a variety of European migrants. Among migrants from Europe who entered the United States from Mexico in the 1900s and later, Greeks, Italians, Slavs from the Balkan regions, and Jews from Southeastern Europe and Russia predominated.41 Individuals from these same ethnic and national groups—Greeks, Italians, Jews, and Slavs—were among those most often being rejected for medical reasons from entry at Atlantic ports of entry during the late 1890s and early 1900s. Indeed, the efficacy of inspections at seaports seems to have risen dramatically in 1898. Between 1892 and 1897, only 179 immigrants had been rejected for medical reasons, but in the fiscal year of 1898 alone, 258 were rejected. In subsequent years that number climbed fairly steadily, and by 1903 officials had rejected as physically unfit 1,773 immigrants. The coincidental timing of increasing numbers of medical rejections at American seaports and the influx of European immigrants passing through Mexico suggests that at least some Europeans may have adopted the Mexican route to dodge medical inspections.42 Contemporary American authorities in fact believed that the “bulk” of European immigrants entering through Mexico came with the “idea that they can reach the United States easier and escape the prescribed examination by simply evading the regular points of crossing, and entering surreptitiously.”43 Italian migrants were reportedly appearing at the El Paso port of entry as early as 1892, but Greeks appear to have been the most common by the early 1900s.44 Unlike the Lebanese emigrants through Mexico, most of the European migrants reportedly had already been turned away as unfit by European steamship lines or had actually been debarred at an American seaport. And eluding vigorous medical examinations appears to have been the main motivation for many of these migrants.45 Typical was the Italian migrant passing through Veracruz in the fall of 1906, bound for

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Ohio. He reported that he had, after being rejected at Ellis Island for “eye problems,” simply rebooked passage for himself a second time, but now through Mexico.46

Migrants and Smugglers on the Mexican Border Once in Mexico, immigrants traveled to the point on the U.S.-Mexico border from which they could find the cheapest, most direct rail service to their final destination in the United States. Migrants from Europe and Lebanon heading to American eastern seaboard states crossed at Laredo or Brownsville, while those destined for the Midwest attempted to cross at Del Rio or Eagle Pass. El Paso was the usual crossing point for those headed to the western United States.47 Chinese and Japanese migrants typically entered Mexico at the Pacific ports of Salina Cruz, Guaymas, Mazatlan, or Manzanillo. From there, those heading to California or the Pacific coast adopted a variety of routes. Many Chinese booked passage by train to El Paso and thence to San Francisco. Others traveled the routes pioneered by Chinese in the 1880s. If landing at Mazatlan or Guaymas, they might travel north by rail to Nogales, Sonora, and then proceed by stage to the small Mexican border communities of Naco, Agua Prieta, or Mexicali. Others sailed up to Ensenada, forty miles south of San Diego, and from there made their way across the border to California. Japanese migrants appear to have replicated the Chinese patterns, some heading directly north into California, others traveling by rail to El Paso first.48 Whatever their route, migrants arriving at Mexican border towns could count on encountering a variety of immigration “specialists” with services for hire. In addition to the roles they played in recruiting and arranging the passage of their countrymen into Mexico, ethnic and crossethnic networks of Syrian, Chinese, and Japanese also took a hand in helping migrants get across the border, often with the assistance of local Mexicans. Mexican border cities reputedly teemed with smugglers. A 1908 letter from the secretary of commerce and labor to Secretary of State Elihu Root detailed the view from north of the border: On the Mexican side of the border, at the towns nearest the several ports of entry, aliens, both European and Asiatic, congregate in large numbers prior to seeking entry into the United States. By reason of the influx of foreigners into these towns, a profitable industry has grown up in the promotion of immigration, by methods seldom more than colorably legal and often simply illegal. There are “boarding houses”

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offering, not only food and lodging, but effective assistance in crossing the border. There are “immigrant bureaus” whose advertised promises plainly indicate the use of unlawful methods. There are physicians professing ability to remove the signs of disease, and there are smugglers and guides in abundance.49

In fact, Mexican railroad conductors often advised migrants en route to the border from Mexico City on whom to contact for smuggling services.50 Arriving at Ciudad Juarez or Nuevo Laredo, migrants at once sought out the lodging houses, restaurants, or saloons recommended to them. There one could receive advice on the process of immigration inspection. American authorities regarded the hotels and other enterprises run by ethnic Lebanese and Japanese as little more than “schools for coaching immigrants as to what they should say during inspection at the border”51 At such establishments one could also be apprised of the local geography or put in contact with individuals willing to lead migrants across the border. In Nuevo Laredo in 1906, American authorities identified a Mexican saloonkeeper who specialized in the smuggling of both Lebanese and Greeks. To drum up business, he held “many unsigned letters and testimonials in Greek and Arabic addressed to all Greek and Syrian immigrants stating that if they wished to get to the United States he was the only man able to smuggle them.”52 From El Paso westward, Chinese smugglers predominated in border cities. Chinese smuggling operations along the border appear to have been more centrally organized than those of the Japanese, Lebanese, or Greeks—an unsurprising fact, given that Chinese smuggling operations dated back to the 1880s. Ethnic Chinese, well established in local enterprises on one or the other side of the border, coordinated smuggling efforts, maintaining close ties with the San Francisco-based organizations that underwrote much of the human traffic they handled. Like other smuggling networks, the Chinese commonly engaged local Mexicans to guide migrants safely to the American side of the border. Smuggling rings crossed ethnic and national lines as well as the international border itself, at times involving Anglo-Americans and Mexicans as well as Asian, European, and Middle Eastern nationals on both sides of the line.53 Although border ports of entry posted remarkably high immigrant refusal rates through the decade, border authorities repeatedly reported through the mid-1900s that they were losing the battle against illicit immigration. Reading their reports about the ways in which immigrants successfully dodged inspection through most of the 1900s, it is easy to reach the same conclusion that border officials did: unmeasured, illicit

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immigration substantially outpaced legal immigration. Although some immigrants made their own way across the border, without the assistance of smugglers, no doubt much of the undocumented traffic across the border resulted from the services of these groups. It was in part thanks to enterprises such as these scattered along the U.S.-Mexican border that immigrants in the opening decade of the twentieth century devised an imaginative range of methods for crossing the newly formalized American border.

“ Passing ” Inspection Migrants entering the United States from Mexico did so either by passing at an official port of entry or crossing elsewhere along the line. Although one can hardly be surprised at the ease with which they managed to cross a virtually unpatrolled open border through the 1900s, it is a bit more surprising to discover how much illicit entry occurred under the noses of port-of-entry inspectors during this time. But from the debut of border inspection through the 1910s, thousands of immigrants of various nationalities successfully passed, often uninspected, into the United States by deceiving American immigration authorities at ports of entry. They did so, often under the tutelage of professional smugglers, by relying heavily on the art of deception, on appearing or posing, on the practice of making themselves invisible, inconspicuous, or misunderstood. The possibilities for “passing” as someone other than who one was were especially rich at land-border (as opposed to maritime) ports of entry. The preponderance of steamship passengers arriving at maritime ports of entry were immigrants, and inspectors could expect to question most everyone coming ashore; inspectors on the border, however, discovered that most border-crossing individuals were actually nonimmigrants. In an ordinary day’s business at Laredo or El Paso or Nogales in the 1900s, individuals subject to inspection as immigrants were the exception rather than the rule. From the very first, then, immigration inspectors at these ports of entry did not ask every single individual crossing to demonstrate his or her right to pass. Instead, inspectors did then what they do now at high-traffic border ports: they made preliminary judgments about the admissibility of border crossers largely on the basis of demeanor and physical appearance. And the criteria used to visually sort through the crowds were individual, highly subjective, and unevenly applied. Border crossers understood that determinations of their “legality” ultimately could be quite superficial. As

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a result, those with something to hide tried to meet inspectors’ expectations about the proper appearance of an innocent crosser. Ironically, given later developments in immigration control, appearing to be Mexican generally ensured an easy, unchallenged border crossing prior to 1917. To avoid inspection, Chinese, Greek, Lebanese, and other migrants often posed as local Mexicans, against whom no border-crossing restrictions were being enforced. An August 1904 article in the El Paso Herald described the manner in which Chinese in Ciudad Juarez dressed themselves in the “natural garb” of Mexicans and shed their “distinctive queues” in order to cross the bridge into El Paso. Their efforts, the article claimed, made them “practically indistinguishable” from Mexicans and allowed them to cross unmolested.54 An undercover Immigration Service inspector investigating Asian smuggling from Mexico in 1906 similarly reported the practice of Chinese disguising themselves as Mexicans. “[The Chinese] cut off their queues, exchange their blue jeans and felt slippers for Mexican apparel, and begin training in the Mexican language, at least to the extent of being able to say ‘Yo Soy Mexicano’”—words that could get them past the border.55 During the same year, A. A. Seraphic, an ethnic Greek U.S. immigration inspector who had conducted similar undercover work in Mexico investigating European smuggling networks, reported that Greek smugglers employed a similar strategy. One smuggler explained to Seraphic that he had passed many Greeks into El Paso simply by having them ride across the bridge on a crowded streetcar. They would leave their baggage in Juarez, and as they rode over the bridge the smuggler would speak to them in Spanish; when the immigration inspector passed through the car he would take them for a group of local Mexicans and ignore them. Frequently, the smuggler would continue this farce further into town until he had successfully placed his charges on a train from El Paso. Meanwhile, the telltale sign of a migrant—his bundle of clothes and personal effects— would be carried over the bridge by a local Mexican.56 Central to the strategy of having non-Mexican migrants appear to be Mexican was an understanding of the ways in which federal immigration agents were forced, by virtue of their unique location in binational communities, to accommodate local, everyday patterns of border commerce. On any given day from Brownsville to San Diego, most of the border crossings might be local residents crossing for work, shopping, or to visit kin.57 It was a pattern to which immigration inspectors and customs inspectors had become accustomed and which could, over time, lull them into a state of lower vigilance. Since border crossers were overwhelmingly

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local, inspectors discovered that their “real work” of conducting inspections of head tax–paying aliens was episodic at best. Lax monitoring ensued. Immigration inspectors were observed napping on duty. Others appeared to let all pedestrian traffic cross without even a passing glance. At still other times, inspectors seemed too enticed by the attraction of a meal or warm office to attend conscientiously to their prescribed duties.58 Inspections that did occur at the ports of entry sometimes were little more than perfunctory. For instance, where Eagle Pass, Texas, met Piedras Negras, Coahuila, northbound individuals typically paid a small toll to cross the bridge linking the twin cities. On the American side of the bridge they passed immigration and customs inspectors. But there was also, a few hundreds yards to the south, a boat that carried passengers across the river for less money than the bridge toll. To save a few pesos, locals frequently patronized the boatman. These passengers, once discharged on the U.S. side, would dutifully “pass under the bridge and stop directly under the toll collector’s booth. There they knock at the stairs and the Immigration officer leans over and looks at them.” After a cursory glance, he typically waved them on as locals not subject to inspection. Not surprisingly, such informality of examination served not only the interests of binational community comity but the needs of smugglers as well. Many Syrians and Greeks reportedly dodged inspection at the Eagle Pass port of entry simply by using this route.59 Inspector Seraphic discovered that familiar patterns of daily commerce encouraged similar laxity in Brownsville, Texas, where they also played into the plans of smugglers. There, he joined a boatload of individuals crossing from Matamoros to Brownsville. Upon landing he observed that American immigration officers stood at a distance as customs officers inspected the disembarking passengers. Rather than giving passengers the level of scrutiny Seraphic expected, the immigration officers took “for granted the stereotypical answers of the Customs officers, ‘I know all these people,’” and allowed them to pass as “local Mexicans.” At towns along the American side of the border the undercover inspector had inquired of sympathetic locals the best strategy for getting a supposedly ill relative across the border safely. In Eagle Pass, a banker advised the best approach would be for the person to “walk across briskly and say he is a Mexican.” A Brownsville confidant echoed that advice. No one would question the person “if she walked briskly from the boat with the Mexican women to town.”60 At times, changes in the dress, behavior, and language of migrants to appear “Mexican” were supplemented with performances tailored to fit

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Figure 3.  A view of the international bridge spanning the lower Rio Grande between Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Tamaulipas, around 1910. The offices of American immigration and customs officers are visible in the foreground. The Robert Runyon Photograph Collection, image RUN04127. Courtesy of the Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin.

inspectors’ expectations of Mexican demeanor. In 1906 in Laredo, another smuggler on the Mexican side of the border offered to take Seraphic over the bridge using a proven scheme. Seraphic explained: On Sunday night he would put me in his brother’s cab with one or two other [sic] Mexicans and all three would sing Spanish and appear drunk, in which case no questions were asked at all [by the inspectors], the presumption being that we were Mexicans going over for amusement or returning to Laredo.”61

The apparent success of this ploy suggests that the idea of “drunken Mexicans” conformed nicely to the racial expectations of American immigration inspectors. Just as they used their sense of proper racial appearance to visually sort those crossing the border, immigration authorities also used stereotypes about what constituted typical racial behavior in monitoring

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crossings. Smugglers deliberately exploited these racial expectations for their own advantage. Pretending to be Mexican was simply one of many strategies that excludable aliens used to gain entry at immigration ports of entry on the border during the 1900s. Migrants had other modes of deception at their disposal. At least some of the Lebanese, European, and Japanese immigrants who feared exclusion attempted to enter the United States legitimately; rather than trying the dodge of appearing Mexican, they dutifully appeared for inspection at a designated port of entry. Yet manipulating appearances remained important. In trying to meet the general requirements for admission, they needed to appear physically sound, not likely to become a public charge, and not under contractual arrangement for labor. Many feared being debarred on one or more counts, yet they managed to present themselves in such a manner as to minimize risk. Appearances mattered very much in terms of the prohibition on the admission of those deemed likely to become public charges. Migrants knew enough that one ought to appear hale and industrious, reasonably well dressed, and provisioned with funds. By the 1900s immigration officials had unofficially settled on $30 as the requisite minimum amount of funds that a head-of-household immigrant ought to possess to prove financial responsibility. To meet this inspection requirement, immigrants commonly borrowed “show money” from smugglers on the border. Once it had been shown to American immigration inspectors, the money returned to the hands of the smuggler before the migrant crossed the border.62 Immigrants knew too that if they were coming to meet family members already working in the United States, they held a distinct advantage. Inspectors at all ports of entry considered such family ties important in the highly subjective calculation of whether or not an immigrant presented a risk of becoming a drain on the public dole. Lacking family connections in the United States, one ran an increased chance of being judged inadmissible. As a result, immigrants sometimes pretended to have relatives in the United States. If a Lebanese migrant en route to the United States lacked family ties in the United States, smugglers in Mexico City “could immediately furnish one and make up a relationship.” The migrant, on passing for inspection at the border, could provide the inspectors with the names and addresses of his fictional kin.63 In their efforts to make themselves appear admissible, immigrants were aided by a simple fact of the inspection system: Inspectors generally accepted the veracity of immigrants’ self-characterizations. Absent the resources to conduct in-depth investigations of each applicant for admis

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sion, inspectors frequently had to swallow their doubts about particular immigrants and admit them. As noted before, this was especially true with regard to enforcing the contract labor prohibition. Unless a contracted immigrant revealed the existence of the labor contract, there was little hope of encountering violations. And immigrants found other ways to deceive as well. A common method used on the Mexican border in the 1900s was for an immigrant to represent that he or she simply sought to pass through the United States in transit to Canada. Japanese immigrants frequently disguised their intentions to enter the United States by exploiting the immigration law provision that allowed aliens to pass “in transit” through the United States. Appearing at El Paso with railroad fares paid through to Vancouver or elsewhere in Canada, they claimed to be migrating to Canada and requested permission to pass through to the United States. Large numbers, however, subsequently abandoned the train as it passed through U.S territory. Officials grew increasingly skeptical of this practice because migrants could make the journey by ship more cheaply and quickly, yet chose the rail route instead. At the same time, few Japanese were being recorded as passing out of the United States into Canada. A December 1907 change in requirements for admission of Japanese in transit subsequently curtailed this practice, but not before thousands of Japanese had exploited it.64 For all, appearing healthy was paramount. Many migrants, especially from Lebanon and Southern Europe, had been or feared being disqualified for medical reasons and had come through Mexico precisely in the hopes of encountering less exacting medical inspections. Disguising medical conditions such as trachoma or favus was not an easy matter, yet many ailing migrants seem to have passed medical inspections along the border. According to Inspector Seraphic’s observations in 1906, Lebanese who had been debarred at New York and others who had failed the inspections of U.S.-bound steamship lines “had no trouble passing a satisfactory medical exam at Laredo or El Paso.”65 In large part, their success was the measure of the incompetence or less exacting standards of the medical professionals conducting inspections in these ports. As an initial step in crossing the border, immigrants presented themselves for medical inspection by physicians serving in an official capacity. At major seaports these might be physicians with the Marine Hospital Service, forerunner of the Public Health Service. Elsewhere they might be local physicians reimbursed for their part-time service inspecting immigrant aliens.66 The latter were prevalent on the border through 1910, and not always up to the standards of federal officials. The physicians engaged in medical inspec

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tions at Laredo and Eagle Pass, for instance, were promptly removed from their duties for incompetence after Seraphic’s 1907 investigation.67 Even where migrants could not count on either the sheer incompetence or corruptibility of local physicians, they schemed their way into clean bills of health. In Ciudad Juarez in the mid-1900s, a Lebanese migrant suffering from an excludable illness could purchase a certificate of health from Alexander Lemon, a Syrian boarding house operator with a side interest in smuggling. Lemon procured the certificates by sending local Lebanese nationals across the bridge to El Paso to pretend they wished to apply for admission. Once they passed the medical inspection and received a certificate of health to present to the immigration officers, they returned to Ciudad Juarez and sold the certificate to Lemon. Lemon then would sell these certificates to migrant Lebanese who had or who might fail a medical inspection. They, in turn, assumed the identity of the healthy person whose name appeared on the certificate.68 Other fraudulent documents also routinely opened the border. The contiguous border created unique opportunities for trafficking in head tax receipts, the official documents given to aliens after they had been inspected, paid their head tax, and been admitted into the United States as immigrants. After the closing of the border to Japanese migrants in 1907, an illicit trade in head tax receipts flourished. Those in the United States in possession of receipts reportedly “rented” them to aspiring Japanese immigrants on the Mexican side, who, assuming the identity of the people named on the receipt, presented themselves at the port of entry with the receipt as proof they had already been admitted into the United States. At the same time, entrepreneurs in Ciudad Juarez had commissioned an El Paso printing company to produce documents that could be used in the production of forged Japanese passports.69 Subverting the border inspection process often required the complicity of at least one border official. Just as the border could never be fully secured against fraudulent documents and statements, it could not be completely guarded against internal corruption. The extent of corruption along the border was not known. Accusations that American officials were complicit in schemes to admit excludable aliens were common, but many probably arose from the salesmanship of smugglers. Many smugglers marketed their services with claims that they had inside connections with immigration officers or inspecting physicians. For instance, many Lebanese migrants passing through Mexico City in the mid-1900s encountered Selim Almshit, a padrone who claimed that he could pass any immigrant through El Paso because “he was a friend of the Doctor, offi

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cers, and the interpreter.” Japanese smugglers working in El Paso in 1908 justified the large prices they charged migrants by claiming that a portion of the money was needed to pay bribes to American authorities.70 There may have been some truth to the latter claim. A spectacular scandal involving official corruption of Immigration Service employees emerged in El Paso in the spring of 1908. Investigator Richard Taylor, dispatched from Washington, D.C., to investigate irregularities at the El Paso port of entry, uncovered a scheme for the smuggling of Chinese that involved payments to a Bureau of Immigration employee. In early March, Chinese smugglers in Ciudad Juarez had paid $350 to William Stratton, an Immigration Service night watchman, to permit the surreptitious passage of ten Chinese across the Sierra Madre Bridge. Stratton had also conspired with a local Mexican to try to recruit an El Paso-based railroad employee to join them in a smuggling operation that would take Chinese from Mexico across the river and place them safely on outgoing railroad cars. The proposition was lucrative; the railroad employee was told he could make $1,000 a month for his involvement.71 Of course, official corruption was not simply a borderland phenomenon. The administrators of Ellis Island too battled corruption among immigration inspectors. But the small and relatively isolated borderland cities and towns in which inspectors worked along the Mexican border seem to have been especially conducive to irregular practices if not corruption. Perhaps it was the environment in which inspectors worked. Life in a borderland city such as Del Rio or Laredo or even El Paso was lived on a more personal scale than in the large port-of-entry cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, and New York; social contact between immigration authorities and members of smuggling networks seems to have been common. In El Paso, the largest of the border cities, with a population approaching 50,000 by 1910, relations between reputed smugglers and authorities were more than cordial. Clifford Perkins, a Chinese inspector stationed in El Paso, recalled sharing drinks and conversation with Charlie Sam, who was known to coordinate Chinese smuggling through the port of El Paso.72 In the spring of 1908, Tom Kate, a man known as “the king of smugglers” in the El Paso region, hosted a dinner banquet for local attorneys and members of the judiciary. In attendance were Chinese attorneys, their wives, the three El Paso-based federal judicial commissioners who heard cases involving illicit Chinese entry, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted such cases, as well as Wong Aloy, the Chinese interpreter for the immigration office.73 And among the “indiscretions of officers at El Paso” detailed in a January 1908 report was the fact that El

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Paso labor agents, no doubt with an interest in maintaining a steady flow of workers across the border, “have been allowed to send lunches, with beer, to the Immigration Office for the officers.”74 Not all such contact lead to corrupt practices, of course, but there was no telling where friendships might lead.75 Interpreters were interesting figures on the border, occupying borderlands of their own, with interests that sometimes extended to both sides of the border. Not surprisingly, interpreters frequently figured in the periodic charges of corruption that stained the Bureau of Immigration on the Mexican border. The need for language translators had always been a fact of immigration administration, and the principal maritime ports of entry employed full-time professional interpreters whenever possible. Officials considered it prudent to obtain the services of translators who held no connection to local immigrant communities, although that was not always possible. Officials along the U.S.-Mexican border, confronted with unexpected waves of Lebanese, Japanese, Chinese, and European immigrants, struggled to retain reliable translators in the 1900s. But episodic immigrant traffic patterns did not always justify the retention of full-time interpreters, and officials often employed local individuals rather than Bureau of Immigration appointees as interpreters. In so doing, immigration authorities ran the risk that the community ties or ethnic sympathies of these locals might cloud the professional quality of the services being rendered.76 For instance, the undercover investigations of Lebanese smuggling in 1906 revealed Anton Kazen, an ethnic Lebanese living in Monterrey, Mexico, to be the “chief instructor of immigrants . . . as to the best method of evading the requirements of the [American] immigration laws.” At the same time, this alleged smuggler’s brother, Abraham Kazen, was serving as a temporary interpreter at the Laredo, Texas, immigration office. Although no evidence suggested the complicity of their translator in his brother’s business, officials deemed Abraham’s continued employment too risky because “the relationship between the two men might . . . open the door to possible corruption.”77 In Eagle Pass in 1906, a similar condition prevailed. There authorities informally relied on local resident Michael Simaan to translate for Lebanese migrants. Simaan apparently offered his services to local inspectors for free, which raised eyebrows in Washington. Inspector Seraphic’s 1906 undercover investigation had characterized Simaan as a man of “palpable dishonesty,” and it was ordered that his services be discontinued and a regular “Syrian interpreter” appointed.78 At El Paso in 1906, the Lebanese immigration interpreter Selim M.

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Mattar maintained a business interest in a Ciudad Juarez boarding house operated by Khalil Khoury, whom officials believed to be involved in illicit immigration. Again, no proof of corrupt practices on Matter’s part existed, but officials realized the danger of giving possible smugglers such intimate knowledge of the workings of the immigration office.79 Two years later, the immigration office was forced to dismiss Wong Aloy, the Chinese interpreter noted for having attended social functions sponsored by renowned Chinese smugglers. Although he was never implicated in smuggling operations, his supervisors had evidence that he leaked sensitive information to the Chinese community. Aloy, who was a civil service appointee, was transferred to Saint Louis, Missouri, in the spring of 1908.80 El Paso authorities had no better luck in their efforts to retain Japanese translators, and their difficulties suggest that the problem was not simply a matter of informal employment and ethnic sympathies. For instance, the immigration office had briefly employed Ging Hasekawa as a translator in the mid-1900s. But they dismissed him when he was discovered to be extorting money from immigrants, and he subsequently entered the ranks of Ciudad Juarez smugglers.81 Immigration officials replaced Hasekawa with L. Pruett, a former teacher in Tokyo, Japan, who was not himself Japanese. Although interpreter Pruett had been observed attending banquets given by Japanese persons in El Paso, meeting with Japanese individuals in Ciudad Juarez, and hosting Japanese visitors at his home at night, his colleagues did not seem immediately alarmed. Perhaps they dismissed this fraternization as typical of someone with an abiding interest in Japanese culture and language. But as someone who had “frequently consorted with Japanese on both sides of the river,” Pruett raised the suspicions of an investigating immigration inspector from Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1908.82 An investigation revealed that Pruett, in collaboration with Immigration Inspector Dodd from the El Paso office, had been working with smugglers based in Ciudad Juarez to smuggle Japanese through the port. Pruett and Dodd met regularly with Japanese smugglers in an El Paso saloon, provided fraudulent head-tax receipts for migrants, and looked the other way when smuggled Japanese boarded the evening train out of El Paso.83 Presumably Pruett, as a civil service appointee and non-Japanese, was to be an improvement over Hasekawa, although he ultimately proved even less trustworthy. Yet, for all the successes of immigrants in outwitting immigration inspectors manning American ports of entry, Bureau of Immigration inspectors clearly held their own at the ports of entry. After 1900 border

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immigration authorities annually barred thousands of immigrants from entering the United States from Mexico. As American officials became more familiar with the border setting and practices, their efficiency and effectiveness increased. The undercover investigations of 1906 and 1907 revealed the central port-of-entry strategies of borderland smugglers and resulted in a new insistence that immigration inspectors carefully scrutinize all border crossers, Mexicans included. At the same time, objections to an increase in Mexican labor migration were putting Mexican migrants under increased scrutiny as well. Through their efforts, then, the ports of entry themselves had acquired some meaning as a barrier to open immigration. For that reason, already in the 1900s most immigrants had begun to adopt, as their primary ploy or secondary recourse, the strategy of avoiding ports of entry altogether. Failing to deceive the immigration authorities manning the bridge or roadway, immigrants could always choose the way around.

Eluding Inspection In fact, according to official estimates, the largest portion of migrants entering from Mexico at this time evaded inspections altogether and thus entered the country surreptitiously. Smuggling strategies in the 1900s seem to have remained essentially the same as those pioneered in the 1880s inasmuch as they were based on consideration of both natural and man-made elements of the borderland environment. Most surreptitious entries occurred within the general vicinity of official ports of entry for the simple reason that smuggled aliens needed access to the roads or railroad lines that ran near principal border towns such as El Paso and Laredo in Texas or Tucson and San Diego to the west. The inhospitable desert made routes across much of the region of the border impractical.84 Typical was the Mexican smuggler in Laredo in 1906, who escorted his Greek and Lebanese clients south of Nuevo Laredo a few miles to where the Rio Grande was easily forded. Across the river waited the smuggler’s brother, a hack driver from Laredo. He placed the migrants in a closed express wagon and took them into nearby towns.85 Further west at El Paso in 1908, Chinese could “come across the river practically at their pleasure without risk of being caught” because only two inspectors watched the entire river front.86 In the even more sparsely populated regions of southern Arizona in the 1900s, it was “a relatively simple matter for aliens to cross the line away from inhabited areas.” South of Tucson, smugglers escorted aliens “along river washes and

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through brush-covered areas” to escape detection by the tiny Immigration Service force and mounted inspectors.87 On the West Coast, Chinese often crossed the border into California using the coastline to the west of Tijuana. According to the 1900 testimony of immigration officials, they were known to “wait until low tide and follow the coast line into the United States over the border, the tide water obliterating all marks of the trail behind them.”88 Chinese and Japanese migrants heading to California often availed themselves of opportunities to use the waters of the Pacific Ocean. Boats operating out of San Diego and San Pedro harbors frequently ferried Chinese from Baja California to California. Japanese fishermen were also accused of engaging in a fair amount of smuggling of their countrymen through the waters off Southern California.89 Even in crossing the border just a mile or so from an official port of entry, immigrants did not simply rely on dumb luck. The successful ones appear to have been extremely knowledgeable about the routines of American immigration authorities and mounted inspectors and the need to blend into the borderland milieu. Immigrants—and more commonly the smugglers who catered to immigrants—took pains to learn the practices of American immigration authorities. From across the border they studied the movement of officers patrolling the American side, trying to ascertain patrol patterns and deficiencies in American surveillance. Soon enough they could become highly knowledgeable about the practices of American authorities and parlay that knowledge into a lucrative smuggling business.90 For instance, smugglers knew that American immigration officials carefully watched railway stations in Mexican border towns in order to apprise themselves of potential U.S.-bound aliens. They therefore cautioned immigrants who planned to cross the border surreptitiously to avoid detraining at border-town depots. As a result, only those migrants actually intending to submit themselves for inspection typically rode the trains through to their final ticketed destination on the border. Most disembarked two or three stations short of the border and made their way to the border by other, less conspicuous means.91 Chinese smugglers aided clients by providing maps and written directions for migrants entering the United States. Authorities in El Paso in 1908 intercepted two sets of written instructions for Chinese. Crude translations revealed intricately detailed descriptions of the overland routes taking migrants west and north. One, describing the route to be walked from El Paso to Tucson, Arizona, relied entirely on descriptions of physical landmarks such as mountains, ditches, telegraph lines, windmills, and railroads to guide migrants along the 270-mile route. It included ad

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vice on where to get water, where and how to avoid U.S. immigration and customs authorities en route, and even the location of a Chinese farm west of Deming, New Mexico, where one could stay overnight. A similar set of instructions, for walking northeast toward Alamogordo, New Mexico, was perhaps intended for migrants heading to the American East.92 Again, though, U.S. Customs and Bureau of Immigration officials introduced effective strategies of their own, such as soliciting the help of locals to reveal the activities of smugglers. For example, officers in the San Diego Customs Collection District in June 1901 reported that most of their successful apprehensions of illegal Chinese immigrants in the prior year had come about because agents had received “information from Mexicans and others near the line that the Chinamen were coming, and where they could be found.” Inspectors had paid “two dollars per head to the informers” out of their own pockets, and appealed to Washington, D.C., for permission to use government funds to pay for tips. “In my judgement,” Collector of Customs William Bowers wrote, “there is only one way to stop the Chinamen coming in across the line, that is by the Department authorizing the payment of an adequate reward for information . . . leading to the arrest of Chinamen coming across the line. Twenty inspectors strung along the fifty miles of boundary line cannot prevent their entry by night, nor could a troop of cavalry.” The Bureau of Immigration subsequently authorized the port’s customs collector to pay up to $5 to informants for smuggling tips; the following spring, Bowers reported that every successful Chinese arrest and deportation in San Diego had resulted from the informant program.93 At the same time, the mounted inspectors force also did its part to assert the boundary. The legendary Jeff Milton, who patrolled the area from El Paso to the Colorado River in the late nineteenth century, was one of many who perfected the art of tracking smugglers and migrants in the southwestern deserts. Charles Cameron, who began working as a mounted inspector in the San Diego Collection District in 1904, recalled one eleven-month period during which he and two colleagues captured twenty-one Chinese migrants per month. The provision of a mounted guard points to the seriousness with which federal authorities took the challenge of enforcing immigration laws away from the ports of entry, and the rugged crew of guards could indeed pose challenges to smugglers. On one occasion, Cameron and a partner spent an entire week successfully tracking a party of Mexican smugglers and Chinese “contraband” through the backcountry of San Diego. The smugglers “chose places as much as possible where tracks would not show, such as rocky ground . . .

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often blotting out tracks by smoothing them over,” but Cameron and his partner ultimately prevailed. Still, the long border stretched thin the resources of the government. And in the vast spaces between ports of entry, smugglers often held the upper hand. “I could spend half a day,” Charles Cameron reminisced in the 1940s, “telling of the different ways to trick us.”94 Establishing official ports of entry and maintaining mounted line riders to enforce various immigration laws could only go so far toward making immigration enforcement on the Mexican border effective. Through the 1900s, the vastness of the border continued to serve the interests of smugglers and migrants. Through a host of schemes and subterfuges, European and Asian migrants and smugglers successfully pierced the newly imposed border inspection system of the 1900s. Already by 1910, the U.S.-Mexico border had become a battleground between immigration authorities and excludable immigrants. Fueled by the innovations of immigrants, the official border developed in a dialectical fashion. The introduction of official ports of entry and efforts to enforce American immigration laws in the 1890s and 1900s led directly to immigrant practices designed to skirt or subvert the rules. Such innovations subsequently led the Immigration Service to adapt its procedures and methods. Migrants and smugglers, in turn, adapted their methods once again. From the point of view of immigration, the border both changed and remained the same in the opening decade of the century. It was simultaneously being drawn and erased. Smuggling activities demanded increasing amounts of the Bureau’s attention and resources at the turn of the century. Undercover investigations of borderland smugglers in the 1900s, such as those conducted by Marcus Braun, provided border authorities with better intelligence on the schemes used by undocumented immigrants. They fostered innovations in border administration and justified increased inspection and patrol forces. By 1910, official reports from the border at that time suggested that the bureau might soon master the smuggling situation. In fact, efforts to restrain Chinese and Japanese smuggling operations did appear to be having some deterrent effect by the late 1900s. But it was the bloody revolutionary violence within Mexico that effectively disrupted illicit entry patterns by interrupting the trans-Mexico flows of migrants into the United States after 1910. Yet it was that same Mexican Revolution, coupled with economic transformations in the American Southwest, that stimulated large-scale Mexican migration into the United States. By the mid-1900s Mexican

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migrants themselves were increasingly crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, and this unanticipated wave of Mexican migrants transformed the meaning and practices of border enforcement. Of course, Mexicans, like their European and Asian counterparts, did not always feel compelled to abide by American immigration law, and they too succeeded spectacularly in undermining the border’s authority. But Immigration Service authorities themselves had a hand in that larger project. Responding to growing labor demand in the Southwest, Immigration Service employees selectively exempted Mexican migrants from the provisions of American law. Just at the historical moment when immigration authorities were seeking to finetune their efforts to build a wall against the undocumented immigration of Asian and European across the Mexican border, they were also beginning to fashion doors to admit Mexican workers.



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Nort hward Bound: Mexic an Immigr ants, Migr ants, and Refugees at t h e Border, 1 900–1921

Chapter 5

We can exclude practically all of the Mexican aliens of the laboring class who apply for admission at this port as persons likely to become a public charge, for the reason that they are without funds, relatives or friends in the United States, and have no fixed destination; at the same time we know that any able-bodied man who may be admitted can immediately secure transportation to a point where employment will be furnished him. Frank Berkshire, Supervising Inspector of the Mexican Border District, 1909

By 1908, the U.S.-Mexico border had become virtually equated with immigrant smuggling and undocumented entry, and was viewed as the most important battleground between immigration authorities and excludable immigrants.1 Reports from immigration officers on the border in 1910 suggested that the bureau might soon master the smuggling situation, but the extent to which American immigration authorities could ever succeed in making border administration as effective as seaport administration remained very much up in the air. And as if struggles with Chinese, Japanese, and Lebanese smuggling operations were not enough, profound changes in the American Southwest and in the neighboring Republic of Mexico in the 1900s had introduced an unexpected wrinkle into border enforcement: the growing phenomenon of Mexican immigration and cross-border labor migration. Economic and political developments in Mexico and the American Southwest in the opening decades of the twentieth century shaped in important ways the halting development of immigration controls on the Mexican border by creating, for the first time, significant patterns of Mexican labor migration into the United States. Between 1900 and 1930, Mexican migrants increasingly came to predominate in the legal and undocumented cross-border traffic. By 1930 they would replace Asian and

European migrants as the central focus of border authorities, but that process was gradual and uneven. Two events in the 1910s—revolution in Mexico and war in Europe—sparked this transition by interrupting the trans-Mexico smuggling routes that had flourished in the 1900s. At the same time, and more important, the dislocations of the Mexican revolution dramatically recast the scope and focus of border enforcement on the U.S.-Mexico line by further stimulating the relatively new phenomenon of Mexican immigration. By the mid-1900s a small but steady stream of Mexican immigrants, mostly men pulled by opportunities for wage labor in the Southwest, already were crossing the border; with the outbreak of violence in 1910, Mexican workers and families began crossing the border in even larger numbers. Mexican immigration profoundly complicated the picture of immigration law enforcement along the border. Border officials struggled to determine how best to enforce applicable immigration laws while accommodating the expanding market for Mexican labor. At the same time, Mexican immigrants were discovering for themselves the extent to which the border could be subverted. Because borderland Mexicans had often come to work temporarily or seasonally in the United States, border officials initially ignored the border crossings of the late 1890s and early 1900s. As a matter of administration, the fact that Mexicans were not subject to the immigrant head tax reinforced the practice of treating Mexican immigration separately. As a result, although subject to the general provisions of American immigration law, Mexican immigrants flowed across the border relatively unrestricted until the early 1900s. Even when border immigration authorities began scrutinizing them more closely after 1905 and rejecting some as diseased, contract laborers, or potential paupers, Mexicans immediately showed the same propensity as other immigrants to turn to surreptitious means of entry. But while Mexican immigrants appeared just as ready as others to disregard the prescribed legalities of border crossing and to enter the United States surreptitiously, they in fact at times found less need to do so. Through the 1900s and 1910s, American immigration authorities themselves at times used informal and formal means to open the border to technically excludable Mexican immigrants. Accommodating immigration laws to the waxing and waning demand for Mexican workers, border authorities became implicated in the construction of a permeable border during this period. By omission and commission, by regulation and by acts of discretion, they created a different, more flexible sort of border for some residents of the neighboring republic.

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A New Stream Mexicans had crossed back and forth across the border with the United States in the decades following the conclusion of the Mexican-American War in 1848, but for decades the traffic remained light and predominantly local. Between 1890 and 1910, this erratic trickle of Mexican immigrants crossing the border for work in the United States grew to a steady and more visible stream. The new pattern of Mexican migration and immigration that emerged around 1900 had its roots in developments on both sides of the border. In Mexico, the liberal economic policies of President Porfirio Diaz created declining workers’ wages, rising prices, and the displacement of large numbers of peasant landowners. Changes in rural landholding, coupled with the program of railroad construction that lay at the heart of the Porfirian vision of Mexican modernization, initially propelled many Mexicans to search for wage work in the country’s northern states. A rapidly growing population added to economic pressures in the Mexican interior.2 As Mexicans from the interior states of Mexico reached the border, they quickly learned that still higher wages were available in the United States, and continued their migration north.3 At the same time, the maturing economies of the American Southwest were exerting an increasingly strong pull on those Mexican workers to cross the international line. Railroad expansion into the Southwest, coupled with large-scale irrigation projects and the innovation of refrigerated railroad cars, spurred the further integration of the nascent agricultural and mining industries into the national economy.4 Small groups of Mexicans from directly across the border with Texas had begun migrating to work in the cotton harvest of East Texas in the 1880s and 1890s, some directly recruited by American farmers. As cotton cultivation spread after 1900 into new areas of central and southwestern Texas, growers tapped Mexican workers as their seasonal labor force.5 By 1900, these “cycles of seasonal migration were already found in border areas and railroads were spreading the pattern to the interior.” 6 Since many Mexicans had worked their way north in Mexico on the railroads, the transition across the border seemed natural enough. Especially after 1900, southwestern railroads relied extensively on Mexican migratory workers for railroad construction and maintenance in California, Nevada, and elsewhere. Railroad agents, along with other U.S. employers, had been known to flout the contract labor prohibition by contracting workers in Mexico for employment in the United States.7 Beginning in

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the 1900s, a handful of employment agencies, established at the important international rail juncture in El Paso, specialized in the lucrative business of securing track labor for railroads. Much of the solicitation came from the runners of employment agencies, the enganchistas, who worked within Mexico to “hook” Mexicans for work on railroads in the United States.8 Quantifying this cross-border movement of Mexicans in the 1890s and 1900s is difficult. The Bureau of Immigration did not maintain statistics on the immigration of Mexicans across the border until 1908. Nonimmigrant workers, the larger percentage of border-crossing Mexicans, were not counted until 1911.9 During the 1890s, perhaps 50,000 Mexicans entered the United States, some settling in the border states of Texas, Arizona, California, and New Mexico, others returning to Mexico.10 In August 1901, labor scarcity in the United States was reportedly the reason why as many as a hundred Mexican immigrants crossed the border at El Paso daily. The following summer, Commissioner-General of Immigration Frank Sargent reported that “a large number” of Mexican unskilled workers could be found “pouring over the line at every possible place of entrance.”11 By the mid-1900s, a steady stream of Mexican workers crossed the border, principally at the ports of entry served by international rail connections: El Paso, Laredo, and Eagle Pass in Texas, and at Nogales in Arizona. During parts of 1907 and 1908, the El Paso employment agencies collectively handled upward of 2,000 migrants a month. An authoritative source in 1908 estimated that between 60,000 and 100,000 Mexicans annually entered the United States for work.12 But the supervising inspector for the Mexican Border District put the number a bit lower in 1911, estimating that an average of 50,000 Mexican migratory workers, most destined for track labor, had crossed the border in recent years.13 Whatever the volume of migration, a significant aspect of it from the perspective of the emerging border control regime was the fact that most Mexican migrants in the 1900s planned to stay temporarily. Mexican migrants at this time were overwhelmingly single and male, and circular migration, rather than chain migration, was the norm. It was precisely this temporary, circular nature of much Mexican migration across the border that shaped the administration of immigration laws along the border in the 1900s and beyond.14 From the point of view of American immigration officials, the stream of Mexican immigration at the turn of the century was not immediately regarded as particularly consequential. A dedicated immigration officer had been detailed to the El Paso port of entry as early as 1893. In the same year, Mexicans attempting to enter at that port under preexisting labor

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contract had been debarred, but such cases appeared to be episodic.15 Even as traffic increased after 1900, Mexican immigrants were not consistently constructed as part of the “border problem.” In testimony on behalf of the 1903 Immigration Act reforms, which gave the Immigration Bureau the financial resources to better staff the Mexican border, Sargent and others focused almost exclusively on Asian and European smuggling. Sargent did mention the new phenomenon of Mexican labor migration very briefly—and painted a rather alarming picture of Mexicans as degraded, peon contract labor. Yet he and other immigration authorities paid little heed to Mexican labor migration in their reports prior to 1910.16 But for the advent of Asian smuggling in the 1890s, border enforcement efforts certainly would have remained relatively low-key. Mexican migrants came to be seen, in the words of the supervising inspector of El Paso, as “legitimate” traffic that, like immigrants at any port of entry, needed to be screened according to American immigration law.17 The way in which the border crossings of Mexicans came to be monitored was shaped by several factors: the special arrangements encoded in law for border-crossing citizens of neighboring nations, the American obsession with Asian and European smuggling on the border, and the developing labor market of the Southwest. Mexican citizens, like Canadians, did not have to pay an immigrant head tax to enter the United States. After 1891 they were technically subject to American immigration restrictions that barred the infirm, contract laborers, and those likely to become public charges from entering the country.18 But the fact that much border crossing involved individuals working, shopping, and visiting kin on both sides of the border shaped early enforcement efforts, as also did the “presence of a strong border culture in which passage had been largely unregulated” by tradition. Congress had in fact mandated, in the Immigration Act of 1891, that immigration regulations be instituted on the Canadian and Mexican borders in such a way as to minimize the disruption of local commerce.19 It may have taken a period of several months or longer before border officials at a given port determined a discernible trend toward Mexican labor migration (as opposed to crossing of local Mexicans) and decided that the immigration inspection ought to be conducted. It is not clear that the process occurred evenly among the ports of entry in operation during this period. Immigration officers at El Paso in 1895 reportedly found it difficult to enforce immigration regulations on immigrating Mexicans because so many claimed to be American-born Mexicans returning from visits to Mexico.20 Another reason for lax enforcement in the early 1900s stemmed from

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the fact that the prevention of the smuggling of Chinese immigrants had long been the main concern of federal border authorities on the Mexican border. With the new funding in place from the Immigration Act of 1903, the bureau’s principal focus lay in establishing a border administration that could deter, if not prevent, large-scale Asian and European smuggling. Their minds remained very much on stemming the “leak” on the Mexican border that had sprung in the wake of their successful efforts in clamping down on smuggling through Canada. In establishing all the routine duties of border administration—inspecting and processing immigrants, compiling the requisite statistical information, holding Board of Inquiry hearings on doubtful cases, inspecting outgoing trains, establishing some sort of border patrol in the near vicinity—officials had their minds on Syrians, Japanese, and Chinese. The upsurge in Mexican migration after 1900 represented something of an unanticipated distraction from the primary work at hand, and officials had little natural incentive to go looking for additional work. As late as 1905, bureau officials were still attending to the basics of border administration, such as attempting to lease a suitable building for the El Paso port.21 Perhaps for these reasons, historians have at times exaggerated the degree to which Mexicans crossing the border before 1917 were unofficially exempted from immigration restrictions.22 But Bureau of Immigration officials did in fact take steps to enforce immigration restrictions on Mexican immigrants in the 1900s. As early as 1902 the Immigration Bureau specifically assigned additional inspectors to Mexican border ports to accommodate the increased traffic of Mexicans. Thousands of aspiring Mexican immigrants were being debarred as paupers, diseased, and contract laborers at ports of entry along the border as early as 1906, and probably sooner. But in the bureau’s dealings with the new stream of Mexican workers in the 1900s we can see presaged some of the unique pressures that the binational labor market would come to place on border enforcement activities.23 Just as it is impossible to develop fully reliable estimates of the size of Mexican migration during the 1900s, so too is it difficult to quantify the immigration enforcement activities as they related to Mexicans. But it appears that by 1902 at least (and probably sooner), some of the increasing numbers of Mexicans migrating across the border could expect to be inspected by American officials at the main ports of entry, Nogales, El Paso, Eagle Pass, Laredo, and Brownsville. The fact that so many arrived at the border aboard regularly scheduled trains filled with other workers certainly must have helped create the impetus for some level of inspection.24

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Table 5.1. Number of Mexican Citizens Refused Admission 1906–1910 Year

Number of Citizens

1906 1907 1908 1909 1910

2,366 1,347 1,053 1,594 3,667

Source: Figures compiled from the United States, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Annual Reports of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1906–1910.

The annual reports of the Bureau of Immigration after 1900 reported the number of immigrant aliens debarred at the Mexican border, but these numbers reportedly reflected only “statistical aliens,” or those subject to the head tax, which would not have included Mexicans.25 The 1906 annual report for the first time detailed the number of Mexican citizens refused admission on the border, and the data for that and subsequent years are summarized in Table 5.1.26 The prohibitions against those “likely to become a public charge” and against the immigration of laborers under preexisting contracts weighed heaviest on Mexican migrants and immigrants. For instance, of the 1,347 Mexicans debarred in 1907, 770 were deemed potential paupers and 367 were refused as contract laborers. Another 132 suffered exclusion because of the presence of disease. Reputed prostitutes, the insane, and other excludable aliens made up the balance.27 In 1908, of the 540 rejected for temporary admission, 283 were rejected as potential paupers, 113 as diseased, and 68 for holding contracts for labor.28 But in terms of suggesting just how stringently border officials were applying immigration statutes to Mexican migrants, these raw numbers are not particularly useful. Without knowing the total number of nonimmigrant and immigrant Mexicans being inspected during each of these years, it is hard to conjecture meaningfully about rates of refusal for Mexican migrants and immigrants.29 That is, we cannot assess the percentages being admitted and debarred. Nonetheless, we can safely say that the rate of rejection had to be remarkably high compared with national rates. For instance, whereas 2,366 Mexican citizens had been debarred in 1906, only 12,432 total had been debarred at American seaports in a year when 1,100,735 had been admitted. Unless hundreds of thousands of

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Mexicans had been applying to enter the United States in 1906, the Mexican rejection rate was remarkably high.30 Although a lack of definitive numbers prohibits meaningful quantitative analysis of border enforcement policies and practices, the figures do lead to at least one inescapable conclusion: the inspection of at least some migrant and immigrant Mexicans appears to have been a fairly wellestablished procedure on the border by 1905, very likely sooner. Without a doubt, inspectors excluded what must be considered fairly large numbers of potential immigrants and migrants from Mexico. In this respect, then, we can conclude that Mexican immigrants, like other national groups at other ports of entry, were becoming subject to American immigration controls. In fact, they appear to have been suffering a disproportionate number of rejections. At the same time, however, there is evidence to suggest that the inspections of Mexican migrants were qualitatively different from those of other immigrant groups, that immigration authorities at times applied a different set of criteria for Mexican border crossers—and in particular migratory workers—than for other groups. For instance, in some regards the evaluation of Mexican applicants as “potential paupers” was not nearly as critical as it was at other ports of entry. Too, border authorities exhibited a strikingly nonchalant attitude toward surreptitious Mexican entry through the 1900s, in sharp contrast to their efforts to secure the border against illicit entry by other immigrant aliens. Where we encounter claims that Chinese smuggling threatened to subvert the whole border, Mexican surreptitious entry passes largely without remark. Border officials duly screened migrant workers and immigrants, as the rejection numbers attest. But from the outset, administration of immigration laws on the Mexican border deviated from the standards in force at Ellis Island and other major ports of entry. From the very start, Mexican labor migration—and the market that hungrily demanded it—created a sort of “Mexican exception” to the standards for admission. The exception was easily enough accomplished under the discretionary authority granted immigration inspectors in applying the “likely to become a public charge” prohibition. As other historians have noted, whether or not a migrant applying for entrance might be admitted or debarred as a potential pauper at times bore a close relation to labor demand on the American side of the border.31 A contemporary observer, critical of what he considered lax administration of the new immigration from Mexico, charged in 1912 that “many penniless Mexicans who would be rejected at an eastern port have been admitted without question on the Mexican border.” Im

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migration officials on the border “have usually deemed no Mexican likely to become a public charge” so long as labor agencies were hiring.32 Newspaper accounts from El Paso in 1907 reinforce this observation of the manner in which the functions of border authorities, with regard to Mexican workers, seemed tightly tied to the market for labor. In 1907 drought conditions in Mexico sparked a sharp increase in the number of Mexican migrants seeking work in the United States at El Paso, glutting the labor market. Border officials at El Paso first felt the crush with the onset of the migration season in February. On the fourth of the month, the El Paso Herald reported that 250 Mexican workers had been denied entrance to the United States. Fifteen days later another 250 were reportedly denied entrance, this time explicitly as potential “public charges.” By the third week of the month, all Mexican workers were being turned back at the border. The surplus appears to have continued into the following fall. A November 15, 1907, article noted that Mexicans were not being admitted at El Paso for work because the labor agencies in El Paso were not hiring. Three days later it noted that 166 Mexicans had applied to cross the border, but only 66 had been admitted, because that was the total number required by the labor agencies working out of El Paso. By 1909, however, accounts suggest that labor demand again ran high.33 These episodes are telling of the approach Bureau of Immigration authorities adopted with regard to Mexican migration. Because most Mexican migrant workers in the 1900s arrived at the border virtually penniless (and often having indebted themselves for the train fare), they were liable to exclusion as potential paupers.34 Certainly immigration officials felt it within their rights to bar them as such. But they seemed inclined to ignore a migrant’s penury when labor demand ran high. Frank Berkshire, stationed at El Paso as the supervising inspector of the Mexican Border District, put the matter squarely in a 1909 letter to the Commissioner-General: We can exclude practically all of the Mexican aliens of the laboring class who apply for admission at this port as persons likely to become a public charge, for the reason that they are without funds, relatives or friends in the United States, and have no fixed destination; at the same time we know that any able-bodied man who may be admitted can immediately secure transportation to a point where employment will be furnished him.35

Clearly, then, although border officials duly screened and rejected Mexican immigrants along the border as early as the 1900s, they also flexibly applied some immigration restrictions to accommodate demand for

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Mexican labor in the Southwest. From the very start, the official border as a brake on Mexican migration was both real and imagined. Not only were restrictions, for Mexican workers at least, enforced flexibly at ports of entry for most of the 1900s, there was evidently little concern about the surreptitious immigration of Mexicans, which invariably resulted from exclusions. In fact, what is striking in official correspondence and reports is the virtual silence on the matter of Mexican undocumented immigration in the 1900s. Perhaps 100,000 Mexicans crossed the border without documentation in the 1900s. That Immigration Service personnel through the 1900s never aroused themselves to combat patterns of Mexican undocumented immigration further suggests the quasiofficial ambivalence toward Mexican labor migration.36 It is not unreasonable to assume that undocumented Mexican immigration began the same day that the first Mexican immigrant found him- or herself prohibited from crossing into the United States. Ample evidence suggests that considerable numbers of Mexicans, alongside Syrian, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants, were successfully dodging American immigration restrictions by crossing the border surreptitiously in the 1900s. That debarments of Mexicans in the 1900s were frequently nullified by surreptitious entry is not surprising. Given that many had spent almost all their available funds to get to the border, they had little choice but to get across and find work; even if they desired it, few could afford to pay for transportation back to their homes. And virtually no barriers prevented illicit entry. The “ease with which aliens clandestinely enter the United States” was a frequent observation made by officials at El Paso and elsewhere. It was a common occurrence for inspectors to encounter on the American side of the border the very same Mexican workers whom they had just recently rejected at the port of entry. For instance, an inspector in El Paso in 1908 recalled rejecting fifteen Mexican workers as contract laborers, only to encounter ten of them later that same day in the city of El Paso.37 In the Lower Rio Grande Valley as well as at western ports of entry such as El Paso and Nogales, border authorities had few resources to deal with such entry in the opening decade of the new century—and apparently little motivation. Not until officials attempted to more stringently apply the contract labor prohibition to Mexican workers in 1909 did any real official concern with Mexican undocumented immigration arise. Then officials seemed almost surprised with the extent of Mexican undocumented entry. In the fall of 1909, an inspection of departing passengers from the El Paso rail station revealed “a considerable number of

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[Mexican] aliens who had previously been debarred, . . . such aliens having in some manner evaded inspection.” That same fall, for the first time to any significant degree, American immigration authorities, especially at El Paso, began to apprehend and detain Mexicans who had entered the country undocumented.38 Indeed, by late 1909 officials had begun to take a more stringent approach toward Mexican migration. The fact that many Mexican migrant workers crossing the border in the 1900s had been recruited in Mexico had always raised the prospect that the contract labor prohibition had been violated. Immigration officials had debarred Mexican workers as contract workers as early as 1893 and continued to do so through the 1900s. But enforcement proved as difficult on the border as elsewhere in the 1900s. The practice of contracting workers in Mexico remained widespread because the prohibition remained maddeningly difficult to enforce. Mexican workers brought to the United States under contract with American railroad firms in the 1900s had, like other contracted workers, been well coached to hide their contractual status. And as a priority of border officials, Mexican contract labor violations remained eclipsed by concerns about Japanese and Chinese smuggling for most of the decade.39 In 1905, the U.S. consul in Ciudad Juarez complained to State Department officials in Washington about the blatant disregard of U.S. immigration laws and the ease with which such deceptions were accomplished: “All such [contracted] immigrants are instructed to say that they are in pursuit of employment &c. and it is difficult for the officials to detect the deception.”40 By 1909 and 1910, complaints that pauperized Mexicans unduly hurt wages in the region forced border authorities to more carefully scrutinize Mexican migrants as being in violation of the prohibition on contract labor. Prodded by the protest of organized labor groups in Texas, officials in Washington ordered an investigation of Mexican immigration in 1910. That investigation, conducted by Frank Stone, documented the practices of recruiting within Mexico that had prevailed in the previous decade. It highlighted as well the degree to which labor agencies had shifted their practices, now focusing on the recruitment of workers on border-bound trains and in Juarez. Even before Stone’s report, border officials had come to view the recruiting activities of the El Paso labor agencies as in violation of the “spirit of the contract labor provisions” of the law. Beginning in the fall of 1909, primary inspectors at El Paso began making more “searching inquiry” of Mexican workers to determine if they had any previous promise of employment.41 In more strictly applying the terms of the contract labor prohibition

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to Mexican labor migration after 1909, officials did create a technically more “meaningful” border, that is, a border that screened migrants more in accord with immigration law. But the change did not threaten to significantly disrupt Mexican labor migration patterns. The crackdown on contract labor came as the practice of recruiting workers within Mexico was waning. By 1910, the pump had been primed, and Mexican migration had taken on a life of its own. The activities of labor recruiters within the interior of Mexico had already become, by 1910, far less important in stimulating migration than the informal networks of migrants themselves. Through the 1900s information about opportunities for work in the United States increasingly came from Mexican workers themselves, who returned to their homes for several months each winter. As they returned to the United States for work the following spring, these workers invariably brought along relatives and villagers. Circular migration was, like chain migration, self-seeding.42 Enforcing the contract labor prohibition strengthened the border in a technical sense, but it had little impact on the developing pattern of Mexican migration. As long as Mexican workers escaped sharp scrutiny of their financial means at the time of crossing the border, their continued labor migration was virtually ensured. Together during the 1900s, both Mexican migrants and Bureau of Immigration officials themselves undermined the extent to which the official border would effectively impose immigration laws on the southern border. The development of immigration enforcement efforts on the Mexican border in the 1900s was contradictory. In some senses, the official border became stronger. In addition to the inroads made in deterring the smuggling of Japanese, Syrian, and Chinese immigrants, the border had been officially transformed into something of a brake on free Mexican migration. Mexican laborers entering under contract and diseased or infirm migrants could anticipate trouble in passing inspection. By 1910, authorities at the main port of entry at El Paso had plans to install facilities for the inspection, bathing, and fumigation of incoming aliens.43 But in other ways, the border did not seem to have become any firmer. Regional economic considerations—the demand for cheap Mexican labor—compromised the application of immigration laws to Mexican laborers. And at the same time that border authorities pragmatically crafted de facto exceptions for Mexican workers, Mexican migrants themselves showed a willingness to keep the border open through surreptitious entry. Undocumented immigration—particularly of Chinese and now also of Mexicans—continued to flourish. Immigration authorities could not predict that Mexican immigration

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would soon represent a significant challenge of its own. In 1908 the Bureau of Immigration director reported that “little if any difficulty is experienced in dealing with citizens of Mexico; the difficulties encountered relate almost wholly to foreigners of other nationalities.”44 The following year, F. W. Berkshire, the supervising inspector at El Paso, acknowledged that Mexican immigration showed “an increase from year to year,” but that it was “scarcely to be expected . . . that there will be in the near future any large numbers in the legitimate immigration arrivals by way of the Mexican border.”45 Authorities felt they had managed to deal relatively successfully with the annual flows of Mexican migrants in the early 1900s. Although screening Mexican immigrants had become a substantial portion of the daily work of border officials, the work still did not attract a great deal of comment from officials, who remained consumed with the project of stopping the European and Asian smuggling efforts. But that assessment would soon change. The Mexican Revolution provided the impetus for hundreds of thousands of Mexicans of all classes to cross the border into the United States, and dramatically recast the problems of border enforcement. But by June 1910, even before political turmoil in Mexico had begun to materially affect immigration patterns, Berkshire was far less sanguine about Mexican immigration. “The immigration of Mexicans has increased largely,” he wrote in his annual report to Washington, “and bids fair to continue to grow. . . . The migration of Mexican laborers to the United States has developed into a problem of considerable proportions.”46 Over the next two decades, Mexican migration moved from the margin to the center of immigration administration on the Mexican border, and as it did so the dynamics established in the 1900s and preceding decades continued. The border continued to be drawn and erased simultaneously.

A Revolution Runs through It From the point of view of immigration administration, the Mexican Revolution could be seen as a chaotic interlude that interrupted the newly begun process of institutionalizing immigration controls along the U.S.Mexico border. Bureau of Immigration officials spent much of the 1910s working alongside American military and customs authorities to deal with a host of unexpected contingencies: revolutionary violence in Mexican border towns, waves of civilian and political refugees, irredentist violence in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, arms smuggling, and political violence. Although bureau officials pursued their regular duties of immigrant in

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spection as conditions permitted, these new problems frequently eclipsed the traditional responsibilities of bureau officials.47 But the period of unrest along the border occasioned by the Mexican Revolution can better be seen as continuing the dynamics of the preceding decade. In some ways, the border as an official barrier that carefully monitored and restricted human traffic across the line became more clearly defined and resolutely enforced in the 1910s. In other ways, and especially for Mexican refugees, immigrants, and migrant workers, the line became less rigid, more disordered, more blurry. As one step toward bringing further order to border crossings, the revolutionary violence in Mexico removed one of the more labor-intensive problems that immigration authorities had battled in the 1900s: the smuggling of Chinese, Lebanese, and European aliens into the United States. Fear of violence and erratic railroad service to the border accomplished what border authorities had long pursued: a substantial decrease in the numbers of immigrants willing to take the circuitous Mexican route.48 (The outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 further helped by disrupting steamship passenger service across both the Pacific and Atlantic.) Chinese smuggling had remained the most persistent of problems for border officials in 1910, but by 1916 the migration of Chinese through Mexico into the United States had practically stopped. Anti-Chinese sentiment and violence, long simmering in Mexico, peaked in parts of the Mexican northwest during the revolution. This Mexican popular hostility toward ethnic Chinese residents made passage through that country even less attractive to Chinese workers.49 Revolutionary violence—and the American responses to it along the border—fortified the new immigration control regime on the border in other ways as well. Various interrelated objectives—enforcing American neutrality laws, preventing cross-border raiding and contraband arms traffic, exerting political pressure on factions within Mexico—led President Howard Taft and, after 1913, President Woodrow Wilson to develop a heavier than usual American military presence on the border. As early as January 1911, 1,500 American troops patrolled the border, trying to prevent neutrality law violations by partisans on American soil. By 1913, about 4,000 federal troops were stationed at the border. Wilson’s invasion of Veracruz in April 1914 led to further reinforcements, especially in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, in anticipation of retaliatory attacks on the American border. Texas authorities fearful of cross-border raiding and violence had long advocated this stronger federal troop presence. The celebrated March 1916 raid by rebel leader Pancho Villa on Columbus,

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New Mexico, and the subsequent American Punitive Expedition heightened the militarization of the border. In May 1916, 4,000 federalized National Guard troops from the Southwest fortified the border. By June, Wilson had federalized troops in the remaining forty-five states, and upwards of 110,000 national guardsman ultimately saw duty on the border before a de-escalation began later that year.50 Federalized troops served a variety of duties, as sentries at ports of entry and as border patrols in more remote stretches. They assisted customs officers in regulating the legal arms trade and stifling smuggling. Their duties brought them into frequent contact with immigration officers, as well.51 When 8,000 Mexican refugees rushed the border at Eagle Pass, Texas, in October 1913 to escape Mexican federal troops, immigration authorities credited army officials with keeping the refugees from “scattering aimlessly.” With the help of federal troops, immigration authorities duly inspected all of the refugees, returning a handful for health violations but allowing most to stay.52 By September 1915 American troops had had other occasions to assert primary control over major ports of entry. In several instances they had assumed positions between Mexican territory and the civilian customs and immigration officers inside the U.S. line and determined who would be permitted to enter American territory. Immigration authorities duly processed only those immigrants or migrants permitted to enter by military officials. As late as 1918, American troops still guarded the immigration port of entry at Calexico, California, during the overnight hours.53 The presence of troops along formerly barren stretches of the border, ostensibly to prevent arms smuggling and border raids, aided immigration authorities by compromising the plans of immigrant smugglers as well. This military presence on the border was something of an immigration officer’s dream. Berkshire noted with satisfaction in 1915 that the military, by stationing soldiers along the international boundary, “supplied a guard which is certainly more effective than any this service might be able to provide.”54 With the gradual removal of American troops in the years after 1916, immigration authorities waxed nostalgic for the effective border control that they had helped to create. The way in which this temporary militarization of the border strengthened immigration enforcement efforts can be readily seen in changing enforcement of border crossing in the Lower Rio Grande Valley in 1915 and 1916. Of all the stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border, the lower valley had probably been least transformed by the new immigration control regime introduced at the century’s turn. From the 1900s on, the problem

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Figure 4.  A ferry crossing the Rio Grande near Brownsville, Texas, around 1910. The international bridge is in the background. Passenger ferries continued to operate on the Rio Grande for decades after the institution of official ports of entry, making it difficult for immigration officers to inspect all border crossers. The Robert Runyon Photograph Collection, image RUN02830. Courtesy of the Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin.

of immigration enforcement had been far more complex in the Lower Rio Grande Valley than elsewhere along the international line. Unlike the regions near Eagle Pass, El Paso, and Nogales, the Lower Valley was characterized by patterns of Mexican settlement along both sides of the border for over 100 miles. There, cross-border family and ethnic ties made the international line seem even less a point of meaningful division, and border crossings occurred more densely and across a much longer span of border. For decades, “innumerable” ferries for hire had plied the water of the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande, carrying locals back and forth for pleasure and work.55 Multiple unofficial ports of entry and traditions of heavy cross-border traffic of locals made border enforcement especially difficult in the Lower Valley. Despite the disapproval of federal customs and immigration officials, these ferries continued to carry people across the border at points other than designated ports of entry through the 1900s. As late as 1907,



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Fred Lawton, the inspector-in-charge at Brownsville, remained unsure how best to address the fact that the local ferries operated in violation of federal law. To challenge the system of county-licensed ferries would, he knew, cause a “revolution in affairs in South Texas.”56 In May 1907 he proposed the rather tepid recourse of preparing a formal notice to “all Rio Grande Boatmen” advising them that they could only carry local Mexicans across the border at their unofficial crossing points.57 F. P. Sargent, the commissioner-general, desired an approach that would not cause “undue hardship and friction” and advised Lawton to avoid “any radical step that would be likely to excite animosity and bad feeling” in the valley.58 As late as 1915, at least sixty-three ferries continued in operation, crossing at unauthorized points along the eighty-mile stretch of the river between the Gulf of Mexico and Los Ebanos, Texas, on the north side of the valley.59 But revolutionary conditions beginning in 1915–1916 in the Lower Rio Grande Valley caused a transformation in official attitudes. A series of cross-border raids, initiated under the “Plan de San Diego” uprising, occurred in the Lower Valley between January 1915 and June 1916. Under the vaguely irredentist Plan de San Diego, as many as 5,000 ethnic Mexicans from both sides of the border engaged in a revolt against U.S. rule in South Texas. Raiders into South Texas killed at least twenty-one Americans, both civilian and military, between July 1915 and the following summer. Retaliatory attacks by Texas Rangers, American troops, and Anglo vigilantes terrorized the Mexican population in the valley. Perhaps 500 Mexicans and Mexican Americans were killed as a result of summary executions stemming from the Plan de San Diego uprising.60 In the midst of violence in the Lower Valley, the continuing use of illicit ferries came under scrutiny. Some contended that “a laxity in inspection methods at Brownsville and vicinity” had been “contributory factors” in the cross-border violence.61 In August 1915, E. P. Reynolds, the inspector-in-charge at Brownsville, indicated a desire to have military authorities assist in closing illegal ferries, and the following month he furnished the local commander with a list of “boats and illegal crossing places” in the valley.62 Military authorities, with approximately 4,000 U.S. troops at their disposal in the Lower Valley, proceeded to station “patrols at all points along the Rio Grande river where there is known to be crossing. The soldiers have order to permit no one to cross at these illegal places, but to instruct them to go to the lawful ports of entry. . . . With all the 4000 soldiers they still cannot stop this illegal crossing; however they can reduce it to the minimum.” The object of military commanders



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was to forbid the entry from Mexico of “all male persons capable of bearing arms” who could not satisfy officials that they had legitimate business on the American side.63 Given that the Immigration Service employed only a handful of inspectors and watchmen to man the ports at Brownsville and Hidalgo in the valley in 1915, it remained a “physical impossibility for them to prevent surreptitious entries” by way of the ferries. For that reason, the presence of the military afforded “a big help to the Immigration Service.” The following spring military authorities continued to “keep the many illegal crossing places between Roma and the Gulf closed,” and Reynolds triumphantly reported that “there is less surreptitious entry at unauthorized points now than ever in the history of the Lower Rio Grande Valley.”64 Local immigration authorities used the military presence—and the atmosphere of fear that violence had brought to the valley—to extract long-term reforms from local officials. Ferries had persisted so long in the region, Reynolds told superiors, in part because local “Mexican” county officials profited from them as sources of license fees, political patronage, and graft from smuggling. Now, using the threat of further border closings, federal prosecutions, and the prospects of Texas Ranger deployment, Reynolds browbeat county leaders into rescinding county ferry licenses and closing the illegal ferries.65 Although illicit ferry traffic resumed with the removal of military patrols on the border, revolutionary conditions and the American response had, for a time, strengthened the border.66 As the Lower Valley and the border itself returned to normal in the 1920s, some immigration officials would look back approvingly on the militarized border patrols of the period. But even as the official border in some ways solidified in the 1910s, in other ways it softened, even melted. For instance, events during the revolutionary period undermined efforts, compromised although they already were, to rigorously enforce disciplined border crossings on Mexican immigrants and migrant workers. For many citizens of Mexico interested in crossing the border, the international line became less, not more, real between 1910 and 1921. Most of the estimated one and a half million Mexicans who migrated into the United States between 1900 and 1930 did so in search of economic opportunities. But many were also compelled by the social and political developments unleashed by the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath. Hundreds of thousands of northward-bound Mexicans fled violence and economic dislocation in Mexico—some temporarily, some permanently—in the 1910s.67 The movement during the peak years of

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violence was complex, involving traditional immigrants, short- and longterm refugees, and migratory workers. Mexicans from across the spectrum of classes joined the exodus. Between 1911 and 1920, over 890,000 Mexicans legally entered the United States. Of these, approximately 262,000 reported an intention to stay permanently in the United States; the majority, approximately 628,000, did not register an intention to stay permanently. In addition, the period almost certainly saw a “substantial amount of unrecorded migration” as well.68 As these numbers suggest, immigration authorities on the Mexican border continued to fulfill their duties through the course of the turbulent decade, inspecting, rejecting, and admitting hundreds of thousands of immigrants. And rejection rates for Mexican immigrants ran high, climbing gradually through the early years of the decade. Inspectors debarred one in ten Mexicans applying to enter the United States permanently in 1913, 13 percent in 1914, and 15 percent the following year. Officials rejected most as potential paupers, although health concerns prevented the entry of a significant number as well. By 1916, 17 percent of Mexicans applying to enter as immigrants were being denied entry.69 Compared to the overall rate of rejection of immigrants for these years, the rate of rejection of Mexicans was comparatively high.70 These high rates of rejection of potential Mexican immigrants notwithstanding, the border was in fact increasingly porous for most Mexicans at this time. While rates of rejection for immigrant Mexicans were high, rejections of the more prevalent nonimmigrant Mexicans were far less common, rising from 2 percent in 1913 to just 4 percent in 1916.71 These much lower rates of rejection for “non-statistical,” or nonimmigrant, aliens resulted from two factors in play in the 1910s, both of which reinforce the suggestion that the international line as a point of passage was becoming, in some regards at least, less rigid and more disordered in the 1910s. First, many of the nonimmigrant aliens were recognized as war refugees. Although some refugees may have sought entry as immigrants, most probably attempted to enter as nonpermanent immigrants, on whom officials clearly imposed less exacting standards for entry. Humanitarian concerns, for the most part improvised along the border and subsequently approved in Washington, led inspectors throughout the decade to treat war refugees more liberally than the letter of the law permitted. Supervising Inspector Berkshire’s 1913 annual report to Washington noted that “humane considerations have led to the admission of a considerable number of refugees who would doubtless have been more rigidly dealt with

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had they applied as other than such.”72 Because of the unique set of conditions in Mexico, at least some qualitative admission standards along the new border dipped in the 1910s, perhaps considerably at times. Further, in practical terms the border can also be said to have become more porous because the phenomenon of mass refugee crossings on the border—as at Eagle Pass in 1913—invariably led to some leakage, or uninspected entry. In the “hurly-burly of congested traffic” during a chaotic mass entry, officials could not account for every Mexican immigrant. Excludable aliens no doubt slipped in.73 But the relatively low rates of rejection of nonimmigrant aliens in the 1910s suggest also a second way in which the border failed to become more stringent in the 1910s. The figures for this group of aliens included not simply war refugees but also the many migratory laborers engaged in circular labor migration in the American Southwest.74 Following the tradition developed in the 1900s, immigration inspectors in the 1910s continued to be sensitive to labor demand in the Southwest; when labor demand ran high, they applied less exacting standards to determine if these were individuals “likely to become a public charge.” The continuation of this practice is evident in the unusual treatment many such migrants received in 1915. Because of a sharp decline in railroad construction activities in the Southwest, labor demand on the border plummeted. Faced with a number of applicant laborers in “excess of opportunities” for employment, officials debarred an unusually high number of workers as potential paupers.75 In 1916, with a “general revival of economic activity throughout the Southwest” again creating strong demand for Mexican workers, officials avoided the “pitiable scenes” of the year past by admitting more nonimmigrant aliens.76 Subsequent years brought even more remarkable concessions for migratory workers and their American employers. By far one of the most important episodes through which the official border was functionally “weakened” as a meaningful barrier to Mexican migration came in the form of a special exemption granted to Mexican migrants between 1917 through 1921. The Immigration Act of February 5, 1917, had for the first time applied the head tax to Mexican citizens. In addition, the act required that all immigrants over the age of sixteen be literate. For most Mexicans of the laboring class at the time, the $8 head tax and literacy test represented “formidable obstacles.” Yet implementation of the new regulations on the Mexican border faced formidable obstacles of its own.77 Farmers and railroad executives “besieged” Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson and other politicians with complaints about the poten

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tially adverse impact the new regulations would have on their industries. The timing of the new head tax and restrictions, on the eve of American entry into World War I, was decidedly inauspicious. After U.S. entry in the spring of 1917, growers “launched a drive to deluge the Labor Department with tales of severe labor deficiencies and requests to remove immigration barriers” on Mexicans. In the name of avoiding “embarrassing, if not disastrous” labor shortages that might harm the war effort, growers sought waivers of the head tax, literacy test, and contract labor clauses of the Immigration Act. Barely three months after passage of the legislation, Secretary Wilson complied, exempting Mexicans engaged in agricultural work from these provisions and establishing a program through which American growers could bring exempted Mexicans workers into the United States for six-month periods. A year later, in response to criticisms that even this relaxation of regulations did not go far enough to meet the labor demands of the Southwest, Wilson extended the program, exempting Mexicans bound for work in the railroad and mining industries and permitting workers to stay longer than six months.78 Further pressure from growers kept the program in force well past the end of the war, until 1921. By that time, more than 72,000 Mexicans had been exempted from immigration requirements.79 The special program gave legal cover to a practice long established at the border: exempting Mexican migratory workers from the letter of the law. It represented an official endorsement of the unofficial practice of admitting excludable Mexican workers into the United States. As it had in the 1900s, the border in the 1910s—at least for migrant Mexican workers—continued to function more as a valve than a filter. What that might mean for the evolving project of immigration enforcement on the Mexican border remained unclear. From the point of view of Mexican migratory workers, it must have seemed especially confusing to watch American authorities frantically drawing—and erasing—the northern border. During the revolutionary decade of the 1910s, then, the relatively young project of institutionalizing immigration controls on the Mexican border both advanced and retreated. Revolutionary violence in Mexico curtailed the Asian and European smuggling operations that had plagued the Immigration Service for decades, while a militarized American border afforded immigration officers far greater control over border crossings. At the same time, however, continued special accommodations for migrant workers and the handling of refugee Mexicans undermined earlier visions of effective border enforcement of immigration laws.

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But in the broadest sense, simply by further stimulating nascent patterns of Mexican immigration and migration, the Mexican Revolution made visions of well-ordered border crossings on the U.S. southern border increasingly fanciful. Until the 1910s, American officials had conceptualized immigration administration on the Mexican border as an effort to stem “backdoor” entry into the United States. The Immigration Service in the 1910s was ill-prepared for the border to evolve into a “front door” port of entry for hundreds of thousands of Mexicans. By the late 1910s and 1920s, they were scrambling to accommodate that new reality. As they did so, they had also to deal with the fact that longstanding traditions of border permeability—some of their own making—stood in the way of efforts to create an orderly system of legal border crossings.



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T h e Sis yph ean Task: Origi ns of t h e Modern Border

Chapter 6

If we had the Army on the Canadian border and on the Mexican border, we couldn’t stop them; if we had the Navy on the waterfront we couldn’t stop them. . . . Not even a Chinese wall, nine thousand miles in length and built over rivers and deserts and mountains and along the seashores, would seem to permit a permanent solution. James J. Davis, Secretary of Labor, 1927

The 1920s were a watershed in the administration of immigration law along the U.S.-Mexican border. The conflicting pressures on border immigration authorities in the 1900s and 1910s, pressures to create a border administration formidable enough to prevent the illicit entry of “undesirable aliens” flocking to it from around the globe yet flexible enough to accommodate fluctuating demand for Mexican labor, greatly intensified in the 1920s. The growing Mexican labor migration and revolutionary conditions of the 1900s and 1910s had created unanticipated administrative problems for border immigration officials. Compounding those challenges after 1917 was the fact that smuggling of European and Asian immigrants resumed with renewed vigor. With the recommencement of trans-Atlantic shipping and reliable railroad service reestablished to the U.S. border, Asian and European migrants again streamed through Mexico in the hopes of entering the United States. Predictably, demand for illicit entry increased with the American establishment of the Asian-barred zone in 1917 and the creation of national quota restrictions on most non-Asian immigrants in 1921 and 1924. And with the imposition of more thorough bordercrossing restrictions on Mexicans in 1917, the incidence of Mexican undocumented entry also rose sharply. With barely sufficient resources to handle the mundane aspects of immigration inspections along the border, Immigration Service officials were woefully unprepared for the new rise of undocumented immigration and smuggling in the 1920s.

The increasing volume of Mexican labor migration and the resurgence of the border as a site of smuggling led to contradictory developments in the theory and practices of border enforcement. By the early 1920s, patterns of undocumented entry involving European, Asian, and Mexican immigration severely taxed the resources of bureau employees on the border and led to calls for the establishment of a dedicated border patrol. Congress reacted in 1924 by allocating funds for a border patrol, which greatly fortified the international line against illicit crossings. But even as border officials clamored for the means to better secure the southern border against illicit entry, large-scale Mexican labor migration and immigration—and the mixed reception it received in the borderlands and beyond—were recasting the border’s meanings. Intense debates in the late 1910s and 1920s about the value of Mexican labor migration echoed along the border, muddying the vision of border enforcement and the mission of the bureau inspectors stationed there. In some ways, the 1924 creation of the Border Patrol was the logical extension of the border vision encapsulated in the Immigration Act of 1903. It committed further resources to the notion that the border, given enough manpower, could be effectively sealed against unwanted immigrants. And yet, partly because of the determination of Mexican workers to cross the border and partly because of a quasi-official recognition of the value of Mexican migratory workers, the creation of the Border Patrol did little to change the fundamental patterns of border permeability. In essence, Mexican immigrants, both legal and undocumented, continued to receive exceptional treatment along the border in the 1920s, in large part because they were cast as “birds of passage” and inconsequential to the social problems attendant on immigration. Even when political pressures finally forced authorities to try to effectively reduce Mexican legal and undocumented immigration in 1929, their efforts proved dramatically insufficient to the task. Thanks in large part to the benign neglect of Immigration Service authorities in the preceding twenty years, a generation of Mexican workers had become firmly entrenched in patterns of northern migration by the late 1920s. The structural dependence of the American economy on Mexican immigration, born in the economic and political events of this period, created the circular migration patterns that ultimately limited the ability of American authorities in later decades to control cross-border flows.1 Only the severe labor market crisis of the Great Depression could succeed in bringing under control Mexican cross-labor migration.



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A Resurgence in Smuggling One of the more dramatically important—and predictable—developments in the 1920s was the resurgence of flourishing immigrant smuggling operations along the Mexican border. Facing new restrictions on their entry into the United States, European aliens as well as Mexicans increasingly sought to defy border restrictions after 1917. Restrictionist pressures became intense in the 1920s, as advocates of immigration restrictions reached an all-time high in their political influence and power. Restrictionists parlayed wartime fears of immigrant disloyalty, an official paranoia of alien radicals, and worker anxieties about postwar labor immigration into new legislative triumphs in 1921 and 1924.2 The new quantitative restrictions incorporated in the Immigration Act of 1921 limited immigration from any one nation to “3 per centum of the number of foreign-born persons of such nationality resident in the United States as determined by the United States census of 1910.”3 The 1924 National Origins Act, designed to restrict immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe further still, limited immigration to 2 percent of the foreign-born as indicated in the 1890 census, although its implementation was delayed several years. By drastically reducing the number of potential immigrants from various European countries, the quota restrictions immediately created a lively demand for illicit entry. Coincidentally, the return of political stability in Mexico helped revive the moribund smuggling routes that had earlier carried excludable Europeans through Mexico; Mexico again appeared to be a relatively safe country through which one could reliably pass in transit to the border. Although an upsurge in undocumented entry of Europeans resulted in large part from the passage of national quota laws in 1921 and 1924, it had in fact begun a few years earlier. Wartime passport regulations instituted in 1918 required immigrants for the first time to obtain visas from American consulates abroad. As early as 1919, Europeans unable to obtain such visas had begun sailing to the Mexican ports of Veracruz and Tampico and sneaking across the U.S. border.4 The volume of traffic occasioned alarm in the Immigration Service. Even before the quota provisions of the May 1921 Immigration Act took effect in June 1921, immigration authorities saw the handwriting on the wall: “As the restrictive measures of this act begin to be felt it may be expected that there will be a large increase in the exodus of admissible European and other aliens for Mexican ports, the ultimate destination of whom will be the United States.”5



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They were not mistaken. “Disturbing reports of smuggling operations,” principally through Mexico but also through Canada, followed in 1922. By 1923, authorities reported that European immigrants, many wellheeled, gave Mexican coyotes—smugglers—lucrative business along the border.6 F. W. Berkshire, the supervising inspector at El Paso, reported in 1923 that European smuggling had displaced even Chinese smuggling as a top concern. Hundreds of Europeans had been arrested in that subdistrict, but probably thousands had successfully slipped past officials. He predicted the situation would grow worse as long as demand—in the form of the percentum quota act—remained in force. The same year, a San Antonio immigration officer reported his office to be in “a battle of wits between our officers and the smugglers,” and admitted that “the odds are in favor of the smugglers.” Like generations of undocumented immigrants before them, Europeans discovered that the “topography of this section of the country is peculiarly well adapted” for smuggling.7 In his autobiographical account of immigration patrol work in the Lower Rio Grande Valley in 1922 and 1923, John Peavey recalled arresting Spaniards, Turks, Bulgarians, Italians, Greeks, and Portuguese (including two disguised as priests.) The problem associated with European smuggling extended across Mexico to the Pacific coast, where many landed at Mazatlan and headed north for California.8 California authorities also reported that the unauthorized migration of hundreds of Japanese nationals across the Mexican border had become a problem in the late 1910s.9 A 1920 report by the State Board of Control noted that “smuggling across the border, especially the Mexican border, has proven exceedingly difficult for the U.S. Immigration Service to prevent.” The commissioner-general of immigration concurred, noting in his 1919 report that “Japanese smuggling across the Mexican border is carried on successfully, and doubtless to a very large extent.” According to officials, settlements of Japanese farmers on either side of the Southern California border were “intimately related to the smuggling activities.” As had the Chinese before them, then, Japanese immigrants in this period also relied on the cultural geography of the borderlands, turning to Japanese living in the United States to aid their illicit entry: “Once safely across the line, the contrabands find concealment at conveniently located ranches conducted by fellow countrymen, where they work for small wages until a smattering of English and an air of sophistication are acquired, when they proceed further toward their respective ultimate destinations.” Japanese fishermen based in Southern California also participated in smuggling Japanese into the country during this period.10

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The World of Chinese Smuggling through Southern California The smuggling of Chinese immigrants into the United States continued apace in the late 1910s and into the 1920s. Much of it appears to have been funded through the Chinese communities in Los Angeles and San Francisco, but arrangements for the actual border crossings and transportation north often involved a surprisingly wide range of conspirators. A newspaper account of arrests and smuggling prosecutions in Southern California in 1921 and 1922 observed that the “smugglers were a polyglot crowd, made up of Americans, Greeks, Italians, Mexicans, Germans, Canadians, English, Japanese, [and] Chinese.”11 Records of arrests and prosecutions for Chinese smuggling from the Immigration Bureau’s Southern California offices in the early 1920s provide a fascinating glimpse of some of the individuals involved in smuggling through southern California. Most of the government’s successful arrests and prosecutions did not reach the highest levels of the smuggling rings. The San Francisco-based Chinese smuggling financiers and their Mexico-based collaborators generally eluded indictment. Instead, prosecutions in the early 1920s involved those caught transporting the Chinese through Southern California. Unsurprisingly, the immigrant smuggling business attracted Americans already involved in smuggling. Jay Robb, for example, a white American living in Fresno, had already achieved great success as a bootlegger when he decided to branch out into Chinese smuggling. Along with two young men he recruited, Robb made arrangements to transport six Chinese from Calexico to San Francisco using his brandnew Packard roadster in November 1920.12 In several cases, smugglers recruited drivers in San Francisco. Paul Pappas, a Greek immigrant living in Sacramento, collaborated with fellow Greek Mike Pilafan in a January 1921 attempt to bring seventeen Chinese from the border to San Francisco. They met while working for the same employment agency in Sacramento, and Pappas had already done one successful run from the border. They first discussed the matter in a Greek coffee house in San Francisco, after Pappas had opened negotiations with a Chinatown merchant to bring a second, larger batch of Chinese to the city. The smugglers’ cars were intercepted by immigration officers near San Juan Capistrano.13 In the Imperial Valley east of San Diego, the twin border towns of Mexicali, Sonora, and Calexico, California, lay at the center of the smuggling demimonde. In garages, pool halls, bars, gambling halls, and flophouses

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on both sides of the border, Chinese, American, and Mexican smugglers eagerly recruited individuals willing to lead Chinese across the border or drive them to their ultimate destination in northern California. Other arrested smugglers appear to have been recruited to the task while visiting Mexicali. Luther Burtz, a thirty-seven-year-old Georgia native who did farm work in the Central Valley, visited the Imperial Valley in early 1921 with a friend. He claimed to have been recruited into the business of driving smuggled Chinese by “a white man named Jud” who operated a garage in Mexicali. Jud introduced him to a Chinese man in Mexicali, who cemented the deal.14 At about the same time, two AfricanAmerican farm workers, Andrew Lott and Albert Williams, were arrested as they attempted to convey six Chinese aliens from Calexico to Oakland. They had met while doing some flooring work in Calexico before collaborating with a Chinese man in Mexicali to drive the smuggled Chinese north.15 Charles Barnhart claimed to have been in Mexicali trying to sell or trade his old car to a local Mexican when “one word brought another and I said I wished I knew where I could make some money and he said he knew where I could make some money. . . . Sunday I was across the line again and met him and entered into an agreement to haul the two Chinese thru.” Barnhart was offered $800 to deliver the two Chinese to San Francisco.16 In all three cases, the defendants did not themselves lead the Chinese across the border, having been contracted instead to deliver them to their destinations. All were convicted, however, of violating U.S. immigration law and sentenced to terms in prison.

The Rise of Undocumented Mexican Entry Coincident with the new rise in European smuggling and persistent reality of illicit entry of Japanese and Chinese aliens, Mexican workers and immigrants turned increasingly to undocumented entry as well. Wartime recruiting of Mexican workers and wartime labor scarcity in the United States had increased the attractions of migration to the United States. Despite setbacks caused by the 1921 recession, labor migration and immigration became even more prevalent strategies for working-class Mexicans in the 1920s.17 At the same time, from 1917 through 1924, a series of developments gradually made legal entry of Mexicans—immigrants and nonimmigrants alike—more costly and difficult. The Immigration Act of 1917 applied an $8 head tax and literacy test to Mexicans seeking entry into the United States, both of which posed difficulties for the generally impoverished Mexican migrants. Perhaps half the Mexicans who annu

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ally came to work in the United States could not pass a literacy test.18 Although the head tax and literacy provisions were suspended until 1921 for Mexicans taking part in the emergency wartime labor program, they were applied to other Mexican migrants immediately. Under the 1924 Immigration Act, the cost of migration for Mexicans rose further still. The new law required all Mexican migrants—those coming to settle permanently and those coming for temporary work—to obtain an immigration visa from an American consulate in Mexico. The cost of the visa added an additional $10 to the $8 head tax that aspiring immigrants already had to pay.19 Unsurprisingly, Mexican migrants quickly demonstrated little regard for the requirements of the official border. Perhaps hundreds of thousands crossed the border without documents between 1917 and 1929. Officials described 1920 as the “worst year ever for illegal entries” on the southern border. Perhaps 5,000 Mexicans had been detained for illicit entry in the district, and officials continued their policy of offering most such aliens the option of taking “voluntary returns” to Mexico.20 Mexican workers had been “apprehended in droves by reason of the fact that they openly and apparently without fear took to the open highways afoot and by motor trucks.” Officials at the Laredo port of entry estimated that as many as 60,000 immigrants, most Mexican, crossed the border illicitly in that vicinity between July 1919 and June 1920.21 Downriver in the Lower Rio Grande Valley near Brownsville hundreds of illicit ferries again carried Mexicans across the river clandestinely.22 Subsequent years saw continued illicit entry by Mexicans. According to the commissioner-general of immigration’s 1923 report, it was “impossible to measure the illegal influx of Mexicans over the border, but everyone agrees that it is quite large.”23 Interestingly, Mexican undocumented entry did not simply arise from an unwillingness or inability to enter legally. The supervisor in charge of the El Paso district reported in 1924 that Immigration Service facilities and staffing at El Paso and Nogales remained woefully inadequate to the task of processing Mexican applicants during the peak seasonal influx each spring. As a result, hundreds and sometimes thousands of Mexican applicants were forced to wait their turn on the Mexican side of the line. The delays could last days to weeks. The delays forced many Mexicans, who typically arrived at the border with few financial resources, “to resort to illegal entry in order to avoid starvation” on the Mexican side.24 With the introduction of visa requirements in 1925, Mexican legal immigration dropped sharply, from 87,000 in 1924 to just 32,000 in 1925. At

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the same time, the number of deportations of detained Mexican undocumented aliens increased steadily, from 1,091 in 1924 to 3,055 in 1927.25 All told, it is not unlikely that hundreds of thousands of Mexican migrants— some for permanent settlement, some for temporary work—entered the United States clandestinely between 1917 and 1929. Devra Weber, in her influential study of Mexican workers in the California cotton industry, estimates that as many as 80 percent of Mexicans crossed the border without documents during this period.26 At the time, estimates of all undocumented entry to the United States (including that of non-Mexicans and that occurring at places other than the Mexican border) ranged from 78,000 to 350,000 annually. Several contemporary observers considered the figure of 100,000 per year to be sound.27 Whatever the exact volume, officials at the time had little doubt that the strength of Mexican undocumented immigration had everything to do with the indifferent enforcement efforts that had met Mexican migrants through much of the 1900s and 1910s, as well as with the wartime recruitment of Mexicans from 1918 through 1921.28 American officials had drawn and erased the border to suit the needs of American employers in the Southwest. Not only had past policies helped foster migration traditions and networks, they had done little to infuse the immigration controls on the border with much integrity. Mexican migrants no doubt read the border administration for what it was: inconsistent. In the largest sense, undocumented immigration in the late 1910s and 1920s, including the immigration of European, Asian, and Mexican migrants, arose from the intersection of labor market demand, the desire for family reunification, and erection of the “artificial barriers” of immigration laws.29 Taken together, these developments meant that the Mexican border, to a degree far greater than ever before, became a site of considerable smuggling of aliens and undocumented entry in the 1920s. That this undocumented immigration on the border swelled precisely as restrictionists sought to tighten immigration controls meant also that both the border itself and Mexican migration came under increased scrutiny.

Visions of a Dedicated Border Patrol In reforming border administration, Immigration Service officials took the lead. They reacted swiftly to the new situation, enlisting congressional allies to create the funding and authority for a new border patrol to assert meaningful control over the border. Those efforts, stretching in earnest from 1919 through 1924, led to the 1924 establishment of the

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Border Patrol within the U.S. Immigration Service. The arguments employed for the creation of a border guard—and the force that emerged from congressional debates—revealed a great deal about how new visions for the border remained mired in older realities. The upsurge in undocumented immigration occurred within the context of an already increasing volume of work on the Mexican border. Passport regulations introduced in 1918 during the war greatly increased the daily duties of port-of-entry personnel, requiring scrutiny of both inbound and outgoing traffic along the border. A one-time appropriation in 1918 helped offset administrative costs, but by 1920 Immigration Service employees in the Mexican Border District were attempting to handle those new responsibilities without benefit of any additional staff.30 Meanwhile, administering the special wartime program for Mexican agricultural labor sapped additional resources. Were that not enough, the volume of daily border crossings began to skyrocket after the passage of Prohibition. In 1920, 546,093 individuals, both aliens and citizens, crossed the Mexican border at legal ports of entry, the number greatly swelled by an army of approximately 400,000 “thirsty tourists” streaming into Mexico from the United States.31 Prohibition also escalated contraband smuggling by providing a lucrative market for tequileros, or liquor smugglers. Technically a matter for customs officers, liquor smuggling invariably intersected immigration enforcement as well, as many smugglers were also aliens entering clandestinely. At the time of all these developments, the Mexican Border District, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, had a staff of only 255 employees, including clerical staff.32 Attending to the various duties at ports of entry required immigration supervisors to remove officers from patrol or guard duty along the international border. The inspector in charge of the Calexico, California, office reported the problem to his supervisors in Los Angeles. “This office,” he wrote in early 1920, “is absolutely unable to cope with the smuggling situation for the reason that six of the employees are engaged exclusively upon passport work, two inspectors and the Spanish Interpreter being constantly engaged in issuing passports, one inspector and two mounted watchmen engaged in inspecting passports and border permits at the official crossing.” Anti-smuggling efforts collapsed just at the moment that smuggling rebounded.33 In order to “frustrate attempts at illegal entry,” the commissionergeneral in 1920 requested additional inspectors and patrol forces for the Mexican border.34 The supervising inspector of the Mexican Border District reported that undocumented entry on the Mexican border reached

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an unprecedented high in 1920, and pleaded for reforms that would “enable the executive branch to catch up with the legislative.” To present the most “vivid and vital portrayal” of the “innumerable and diversified problems confronting immigration officers on the Mexican border,” he provided officials in Washington with excerpts from the reports of various port-of-entry supervisors. The commissioner-general in turn folded those into his annual report to bolster the argument for increased personnel.35 Remarkably, they made it sound as if the previous twenty years spent creating an Immigration Service presence on the border had been for naught. Calls for a border patrol force reflected the candid assessment of immigration authorities that effective control of migration across the Mexican border still eluded them. From El Paso came the conclusion that “practically any alien desirous of entering the United States and possessed of ordinary intelligence and persistence could readily find the means . . . of so doing without fear of detection.” It was a “sad commentary” on the federal government that it “maintains expensive control stations along the frontier of nearly 3,000 miles, where officers are engaging in receiving and considering the applications of aliens for admission, rejecting those unfit, without providing that control in the areas between stations necessary to render the work of said stations effective.”36 At Douglas, Arizona, the lack of a border guard and even of sufficient staff for the port of entry engendered wholesale violations of the immigration laws. Smugglers using automobiles carried aliens across the border at “anyplace sufficiently distant to escape the observation of the immigration office.” They were also able to drive across the border at the official port of entry at night, “when no officer is on duty.”37 Near Laredo, local coyotes advised aliens that only a fool would submit himself to the costs and indignities at a legal port of entry when he could “go up the river 1 or 2 miles above or below Laredo and cross cheaper.” In fact, absent a patrol guard along the river, “the only difficulty any alien experiences was at the international footbridge, where he was trying to enter in accordance with the law.”38 In subsequent years, the refrain continued, and officials used their annual reports and congressional hearing to sketch the contours of the desired border patrol force. The 1923 annual report of the commissionergeneral of immigration, written no doubt with an eye to supporting the legislative proposals for a border patrol, began with a historical overview of border enforcement activities. The commissioner-general traced the problem of smuggling from the 1880s forward, highlighting the way in



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which restrictions “invariably promoted” alien smuggling. With the body of American immigration law now replete with restrictions, it was time for border enforcement to come of age. “The practical answer to all this,” he concluded, “is that a border patrol, coast guard, and airplane equipment should be organized and financed, the whole to be directed by a single Government agency for the enforcement of all federal statutes relating to the importation of aliens, merchandise, intoxicating liquor, and narcotics.”39

Creation of the Border Patrol In fact, congressional immigration committees had evinced an interest in establishing a border patrol as early as 1919.40 A bill introduced in the Sixty-sixth Congress would have appropriated $250,000 to establish a “patrol guard” in the Bureau of Immigration to enforce both immigration and customs laws. But the process moved slowly, in part because of jurisdictional conflicts between the Immigration Service and the Bureau of Customs. Too, a lack of knowledge about the border region and the work of the Immigration Service on the border hampered the process. At one point, congressmen questioned a clearly puzzled Coast Guard officer about the possibilities of building the border patrol out of the Coast Guard.41 In hearings on Immigration Service manpower on the border, congressional investigators and Immigration Service officials picked up the conversation begun in 1902–1903 on visions for border administration. At that time, neither congressional representatives nor Bureau of Immigration officials had carefully explored what might constitute reasonable enforcement expectations for the land borders. In 1903, Inspector Rob‑ ert Watchorn and Commissioner-General Frank Sargent had encouraged vague notions that completely curtailing illicit entry and smuggling was possible. But this time, border officials were clearer on the issues of the purposes and possibilities of immigration enforcement activities. By the early 1920s, immigration officials encouraged Congress to think of the proposed border patrol force as part of the overall deterrent effect of the border on illicit immigration. But many in Congress remained wedded to the notion that a large enough force of officers, properly equipped and deployed, might effectively seal the border. “How many men would be required to patrol that border of 2,000 miles,” Ohio Representative Benjamin Welty asked Berk-



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shire at a February 1920 hearing, “for the purpose of protecting ourselves against all undesirables?” Berkshire suggested that an additional 400 officers might suffice to “enforce it to a reasonable certainty.” But, he added, “You have to take this consideration into mind . . . To absolutely sew up the border so that nobody will get across would take more than the standing army because they would have to be in sight of each other.” But Welty did not want to imagine any leakage. Would only 400 additional officers adequately allow enforcement of the immigration laws? “There is no use of having a law unless you enforce it,” he intoned. “The question is, do you want to enforce the law; do you want to repeal the law, or to enforce it?” Berkshire reiterated his estimate that 400 officers would “practically guarantee” to enforce the law. The congressman persisted, seemingly confused: “You say you will practically guarantee to enforce it with 400; but you said before that you would have to have each one of those guards within sight of the next one?”42 During the following day of hearings, two experienced border inspectors, George Webb and Jeff Milton, accompanied Berkshire to explain the deterrence strategies along the border. Webb had been an immigration inspector for nineteen years, working out of the tiny inland California port of Campo. He now served as the inspector-in-charge between Calexico and San Diego. Milton’s career on the border extended back to the previous century, when he had served as one of the first mounted Chinese inspectors and line riders for the Customs Bureau along the SonoraArizona border. Milton attempted to demonstrate the folly of imagining a sealed border by explaining the physical challenges posed by the border geography: There is no barbed wire or anything. It is absolutely open country. Here is an imaginary line, valleys and mountains through that section, and right in my neighborhood coming from Mexico there are probably about ten wagon roads crossing that line in that distance. Of course, there are also numerous trails.

Given this setting, any vision of sealing the border with sufficient guards was farcical.43 Webb concurred: “You take most of the country along the boundary line and it would be nonsensical to attempt to prevent the entry of aliens by placing a large force of men along the boundary line.”44 Patrols could, however, deter illicit entry by intelligently deploying themselves at the key transportation crossroads. From their earliest work enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts, immigration authorities had discovered that the



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deserts and mountain wilderness could be made effective allies in the fight against undocumented entry. Desolate routes deprive migrants of access to food and water. Only along well-defined roads or on railroads could immigrants obtain the necessary resources for travel, and it was along those routes that immigration patrols might best be stationed to capture undocumented immigrants.45 The vision of the border as, at best, a deterrent to illicit entry (rather than a guarantee against it) seemed a bitter pill for many ardent restrictionists to swallow in 1920. But border officials understood that promises beyond that were impossible to keep and foolish to make. At mid-decade, the secretary of labor discouraged notions that any Immigration Service patrol could close the border to the determined immigrant: If we had the Army on the Canadian border and on the Mexican border, we couldn’t stop them; if we had the Navy on the water-front we couldn’t stop them. . . . Not even a Chinese wall, nine thousand miles in length and built over rivers and deserts and mountains and along the seashores, would seem to permit a permanent solution.46

The goal of border enforcement, in the words of another federal official, was to “at least make attempts to cross the border dangerous and to hold illegal entry down to small proportions.”47 Provision for a dedicated patrol force did not come about until 1924. That year, in the midst of debate on the National Origins Act, Texas representative Claude Hudspeth introduced a rider to an appropriations bill securing $1 million to fund a border patrol along the Mexican and Canadian borders. Hudspeth, representing the congressional district encompassing El Paso, was sympathetic to the difficulties of border enforcement and had consulted with immigration officials at El Paso before submitting his bill.48 For the first several years, Border Patrol officers served only on the Mexican border. The initial appropriation of $1 million had financed the hiring of 472 officers by the end of 1925, and these patrolmen served under the direction of inspectors-in-charge in the three immigration subdistricts along the Mexican border. Many were former Texas Rangers and military veterans, attracted by the fact that officials represented the job as “very much a soldier’s job.”49 In 1926 the commissioner-general of immigration believed that, thanks especially to the efforts of the new Border Patrol, fewer undocumented aliens had entered across the Mexican border in the previous year. Still, in the face of “increasing” efforts to defy the immigration laws and with



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Figure 5.  Border Patrol agents pose in front of their tents during a Desert Camp training outing in the Arizona desert in 1937. The rugged terrain of the Sonoran Desert posed challenges for both immigrants and border enforcement officials. Arizona Historical Society, Tucson, PC 42/f.5/42841.

faster automobiles and boats at the disposal of smugglers, he foresaw a need to expand the force significantly. A force of at least 1,000 patrol officers, he argued, was in order.50 By 1927, the appropriation for the Border Patrol had increased 50 percent, to $1.5 million, and the Border Patrol force had grown to 781 officers. In that year they had made 17,225 apprehensions along the land borders and were a source of great pride to the Immigration Service.51 From the start, assessing the effectiveness of the Border Patrol would be a maddening exercise, tied as it inextricably was to the unknowable volume of undocumented entry attempts. The Border Patrol hardly brought an end to smuggling or undocumented entry, and there is no way to assess even the degree to which it immediately succeeded in stemming patterns of illicit entry in the years after 1924. An increased patrol force and more vigorous attention to Mexican undocumented entry after 1928 began to reverberate along the border, but the first few years of its activities did not result in any dramatic victories for enforcement officials. Instead, officials’ efforts to better control the border in the 1920s continued alongside efforts to undermine that control.

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Contesting the Hardening Border Too keen a focus on the introduction of the Border Patrol and fortification of the border in the 1920s might obscure the manner in which the border continued to be undermined in subtle ways during this period. Reports of continued European smuggling appeared in the press through the late 1920s. A 1927 New York Times article suggested a “conservative estimate” that 100,000 illegal entries occurred annually across the American land borders. Smuggling rings had their “agents in the capitals of Europe and Asia,” according to the article, selling the “easy route” to the United States to those “impatient of national quotas.” On the Canadian border near Detroit, an “American suit of clothes and hair-cut to match” made it easy for Poles, Russians, and other northern Europeans to cross the border uninspected. And, the article noted, “the crooked trail makes physical and mental examination unnecessary.” Greeks, Lebanese, Italians, and Chinese continued to be routed through Mexico.52 Like other potentially excludable immigrants, Mexican workers had the option of attempting to enter in accordance with American regulations at ports of entry or surreptitiously. No doubt the vast majority adopted the latter approach and became the concern of Border Patrol officers. Even so, it is illuminating to see the extent to which at least some Mexican immigrants gained “legal” entry without meeting the requirements for entry in the 1920s. Choosing to enter at an official port of entry, Mexicans had to pay the head tax and also meet the general requirements, including the new literacy standard. One might expect application of the seemingly objective criteria of literacy to have been rather straightforward. Although an aspiring Mexican immigrant might, in the past, have hidden successfully his contract labor status, the literacy test promised to give inspectors a far greater degree of precision on a key requirement for alien admissibility. At border inspection stations, a Mexican immigrant would be asked to read, in his native language, one of several printed passages in order to demonstrate that he or she was lettered.53 Those who did not know how to read were not to be admitted. Or so the law declared. Although El Paso District Director G. C. Wilmoth stated definitively in 1929 that “illiteracy is a condition that can not be concealed,” he was not being true to the field experiences of his own inspectors through the 1920s. An inability to read and write could be and sometimes was effectively concealed from inspecting officers on the U.S.-Mexico border. Indeed, the appearance of literacy could be achieved with very little effort. Wilmoth himself reported that at least one unlettered Mexican

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avoided the literacy requirement by pretending to read a newspaper as he sat waiting his turn for the immigration inspection on the Santa Fe Street International Bridge in El Paso. Having been convinced by this aspiring immigrant’s performance, the inspecting officer did not bother to administer the standard reading test, and, all other requirements being met, he granted the applicant legal entry into the United States.54 A more organized response to the literacy provisions emerged in the border cities of El Paso and Laredo, where smugglers helping Mexican workers enter the United States devised an effective ruse to disguise illiteracy. Somehow smugglers had obtained copies of the exact text of the various Spanish-language reading cards. Equipped with these, they taught their illiterate clients to recognize the first word or words of the various cards and to commit to memory the ensuing text. In this fashion, they enabled an aspiring immigrant to give a “flawless exhibition of ‘reading’ [a] card.” The success rate of this memorization scheme was significant enough to cause inspectors to themselves devise a handful of counterdeceptions to curtail the practice. Some covered the first few lines of a test card and asked immigrants to begin reading from somewhere in the middle rather than at the beginning; others created altogether new cards with nonsensical strings of words that were difficult to memorize. Faced with these unexpected changes, immigrants who had planned to recite a reading test from memory were stumped. By the late 1920s, the inspectors believed they had foiled the memorization scam.55 Surreptitious entry remained the far bigger problem in terms of Mexican illicit entry, and no doubt a far greater number took the way around. But these episodes from the 1920s are important because they remind us that, even as it was being fortified by the introduction of a border patrol force, the official border remained, even at its strongest points, quite vulnerable. Like the Chinese and Greek immigrants dodging port-of-entry inspection in the 1900s, Mexican immigrants in the 1920s demonstrated the degree to which guile could undermine the border.

The Mexican Exception But even as Mexican immigrants themselves undertook to keep the border permeable in the face of new restrictions after 1917, they had a great deal of assistance from the southwestern economic interests that exploited their labor. In fact, events of the 1920s revealed the extent to which the other participants in the binational labor market—employers of Mexican labor—also could be said to have helped undermine the official border.

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Two decades of dependence on Mexican migratory workers in Texas and a deepening reliance among California agriculturists on Mexican labor led Southwest growers, along with other regional industrial interests, to demand continued access to Mexican workers after 1917. Their activities took two basic forms: prevention of further restrictions on Mexican cross-border movement and undermining of the restrictions in place. First, growers and other large-scale employers of Mexican labor fought in the political arena to block passage of additional restrictions on Mexican immigration. Earlier, they had exploited wartime labor shortage fear to gain a temporary reprieve from the effects of the Immigration Act of 1917. In the 1920s, their energies remained focused on the daunting task of preserving the “Mexican exception,” on keeping Mexican immigrants out of the national quota system. Since 1882, the body of immigration restrictions had been born of intellectual constructions of various alien “menaces.” Therefore, employers intent on preserving their access to Mexican workers in the 1920s tried to alleviate any sense that Mexicans, too, represented a menace to American society. Already by the 1910s, employers in the Southwest had perpetuated popular ideas that Mexicans were “inherently backward, slow, docile, indolent, and tractable people.” But, as David Gutiérrez and others have ably demonstrated, employers simultaneously argued that “these characteristics constituted the very virtues that made Mexicans an ideal (and cheap) labor force.”56 According to advocates of their continued immigration, Mexicans were biologically suited for the often harsh working conditions of the American Southwest. Agricultural labor required arduous stoop labor to which Mexicans, “due to their crouching and bending habits, are fully adapted.” Mexicans alone, they argued, can withstand the desert heat, and American workers simply refused to do the labor Mexicans did. That Mexicans were not a “particularly enterprising” class of immigrants, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times testified in 1930, made them all the “more desirable,” for they remained content with secondclass work and pay.57 Perhaps the most important element in this construction of Mexicans as inferior but unthreatening others was the argument that Mexicans, by virtue of the contiguous border, were “birds of passage” who came only temporarily to the United States.58 Circular labor migration patterns had been a prominent characteristic of much Mexican migration from the 1890s on. The Dillingham Commission’s 1911 report on American immigration policy noted that most Mexican workers “return to their native land after a short time” in the United States.59 Because of these “homing

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instincts,” Mexicans workers were deemed ideally suited to serve as the temporary, seasonal workforce in American agriculture. Their potential threat to American society—as culturally inferior nonwhites—was thus mitigated by the fact that Mexicans only infrequently came to stay permanently.60 There was, advocates of Mexican labor argued, no need to fashion walls to keep Mexicans out; the border was simply a revolving door through which Mexicans entered and returned. All of these characterizations of Mexicans and Mexican immigrants developed contemporaneously with ongoing congressional battles after 1924 over Mexican immigration. Mexicans had been excluded, along with all citizens of Western Hemisphere nations, from the Emergency Immigration Act quotas established in 1921, in large part because that bill had been crafted amid fears of postwar European immigration. But by 1924, when Congress replaced the emergency quotas with the permanent quota scheme encoded in the National Origins Act, opposition to Mexican immigration had arisen in both houses of Congress. Congressman John C. Box, who would emerge as the “growers’ nemesis” on the issue of Mexican immigration, led a campaign in the House to extend the 1924 quotas to Western Hemisphere nations. A handful of restrictionist senators attempted to do so in the Senate as well. But southwestern growers, buttressed by the popular notion of Mexicans as temporary, seasonal workers, prevailed in blocking their efforts. State Department officials, inveighing against potential damage to “pan-American relations,” helped defeat the measure as well.61 In addition to battling further restrictions on Mexican worker migration, growers also tried to keep the border permeable by exerting influence over the implementation and enforcement of immigration laws along the border. While border patrolmen were charged with enforcing all immigration laws, there is evidence to suggest that they put significantly less effort into detaining undocumented Mexican workers than to catching European and Asian aliens. Unofficially, at least, European and Asian undocumented aliens remained the top priority in the first several years of operation.62 Wesley E. Stiles, one of the first border patrolmen appointed in the summer of 1924, recalled that “the thing that established the Border Patrol was the influx of European aliens.” He and the other five patrolmen assigned to the immigration subdistrict at Del Rio, Texas, specifically “looked for European aliens.” In fact, border patrolmen “didn’t pay much attention to the Mexicans,” precisely because they understood them to be cheap labor for the regional economy. Mexicans “were coming over here to chop cotton, pick cotton, or some vegetables.

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All purely farm work.” Relying on tips from local ranchers, Stiles and his colleagues caught “quite a few European aliens, Syrians and everything in the world” in their first years on the job. Stiles did not recall beginning to focus on Mexican undocumented workers until 1926.63 Stiles’s testimony notwithstanding, the degree to which Immigration Service officers focused on Mexican undocumented workers seems to have varied at different points along the border in 1924 and 1925. For instance, in the fall of 1925, immigration authorities staged a celebrated raid on Mexican migrant labor camps in the cotton-rich Imperial Valley of California. But the political fallout from that raid illuminates the generally cautious approach the Immigration Service and Border Patrol took toward the phenomenon of Mexican undocumented entry. The raid resulted in the apprehension of considerable numbers of Mexican workers and, according to growers, it also frightened other workers out of the valley. In response to vociferous protests from the local grower’s association, the Labor Department dispatched I. F. Wixon, the chief of the Immigration Bureau, to meet with growers. According to newspaper accounts, Wixon assured growers that the Immigration Service had no desire to deport their workers. He proposed a “gentlemen’s agreement” under which the valley’s growers could voluntarily bring their undocumented Mexican workers before Immigration Service inspectors and have their status legalized. By virtue of an arrangement under which Mexican workers would pay, on installment, the head tax and visa fees, growers were permitted to keep their workforce in place. Within six months, 6,500 workers had been duly registered. The arrangement came under scathing criticism from California labor advocates, the local Mexican consul, and restrictionists in Congress. Congressmen Box, who represented rival cotton growers in East Texas, charged that the Labor Department had undercut the intention of Congress to stem undocumented immigration.64 This episode in the Imperial Valley suggests that southwestern U.S. growers did succeed in applying pressure on the Immigration Service to treat Mexican undocumented entry differently.

A Tightening of the Border The birth of the Border Patrol, then, did not immediately stem undocumented immigration to the degree that at least some Americans desired. But political developments after 1924 militated against the continued neglect of Mexican undocumented immigration. Pressures built in the late 1920s to greatly restrict Mexican immigration by including Mexico in

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the national quota system. Congressman Box, blocked in his efforts to extend the National Origins Act to include Mexico, pressed forward on the issue in subsequent years. Concurrently, debates about Mexican immigrants and the exemption of Mexicans from quota restrictions raged in the American press. Social scientists, eugenicists, patriotic societies, and journalists assailed Mexican immigrants as inferior stock, dangerous to American society. Labor organizations decried them as unfair competition, a claim taken up in the prominent pages of the Saturday Evening Post.65 Box himself argued that the open door to Mexico portended another race problem in the United States, in particular, further “mongrelization” of the white race. Legislative proposals by Box and others to extend the quota to Mexicans resurfaced, resulting in extensive congressional hearings in 1926 and again in 1928. The 1926 House hearings, in which growers faced off against various advocates of restriction, did not result in a favorable committee report for the bill from the crucial House Immigration and Naturalization Committee.66 But by 1928, an increasing number of congressional representatives had begun to line up behind efforts to restrict Mexican immigration. Concurrent hearings in the House and Senate early that year considered several proposed quota modifications that would apply limits to Mexican immigrants. The various proposals would have given Mexico an allotment of between 1,500 and 7,800 visas annually. The Labor Department and the commissioner-general of immigration supported the proposed restrictions, but the bills galvanized equal amounts of support and opposition. Railroad and agricultural representatives testified against the bill, with prominent support from representatives of the Department of Agriculture and Department of the Interior. Perhaps most important, the Department of State again argued strenuously against extending quotas to Mexico. At a time when the American government had several “questions of a most important and acute nature” pending with Mexico, diplomats feared the proposed quotas would unnecessarily generate ill will. One analyst suggested applying quotas to Mexicans simply had been deemed impracticable: “The pressure to bring Mexicans across the border would be so great and smuggling them would become so profitable that a quota law would quickly become a joke.” Certainly the Mexican border, in the minds of those charged with enforcing immigration law in the 1920s, could not become that. Neither the House nor the Senate bills ever made it to the floor.67 But, as historian Mark Reisler points out, State Department fears that

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the quota proposals might ultimately triumph led it to seek “an inoffensive method of limiting Mexican immigration.” To that end, in April 1928 it advised visa-granting consular officials in Mexico to “exert greater care in issuing immigrant visas and to refuse visas to all applicants not entitled to them under the law.” The following February, State Department officials convened consular representatives in Mexico City and pressed them to vigorously apply the public charge, contract labor, and literacy provisions of the law. From July 1929 through March 1930, the number of visas issued to Mexicans dropped 75 percent from the rates of previous years.68 By 1930, the American consul at Nuevo Laredo reported “cutting down the issuance of visas in our office to . . . the bare bones. An applicant must have at least $2000 in cash or property and an income of at least $300 a month to convince me he will not become a public charge.”69 While these new visa standards were sharply contracting legal immigration from Mexico, the Border Patrol began to focus in earnest on Mexican undocumented immigration. Apprehensions of smuggled aliens by the Border Patrol had risen steadily, from 10,686 in 1927 and 18,000 in 1928 to 29,568 in 1929, most on the Mexican border. An Immigration Service official in 1929 declined to acknowledge what was obvious to border residents and observers, that the Border Patrol had begun adopting a policy of rigid enforcement of prohibitions against Mexican undocumented immigration.70 But borderland residents—growers, Mexican workers, and Mexican Americans—felt the pinch after 1929. According to economist Paul Taylor, who did extensive fieldwork in 1929 with Mexican workers in the onion and cotton fields of Dimmit County, Texas, Border Patrol inspections of Mexicans were “carried out with vigor in early 1929” after years of “very lax” enforcement. These activities led both to grower resentment and fear and anger within the Mexican and MexicanAmerican communities.71 By 1930, then, State Department and immigration officials had perfected the mechanisms by which Mexican legal migration could be brought under control without resort to quota legislation. In fact, the solution they seized on—visa controls to limit legal migration, and a border patrol to deter illegal migration—created precisely the sort of administrative flexibility that could in coming decades successfully reconcile the competing demands of growers and restrictionists. At the same time, Congress sought to further tighten border controls when it strengthened the penalties for illicit entry in the Registry Act of 1929. Under the provisions of the new law, entry without inspection became a misdemeanor and deported aliens caught trying to reenter the

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United States became subject to two years’ imprisonment.72 Wesley Stiles saw these various threads come together in 1929. Stiles, who had left the Border Patrol to become an immigrant inspector in August 1928, remembered a sharply shifting attitude in the Immigration Service toward Mexican undocumented workers after 1929. He recalled that in 1929 the “higher-ups” in the Immigration Service pressed him and other inspectors in the Lower Rio Grande Valley to prosecute a batch of detained undocumented Mexican immigrants in Edinburgh, Texas. In the past, most such aliens would simply have been granted “voluntary returns,” but immigration authorities apparently sought to send a message about the new regime.73 The new performance was convincing. In 1930, Taylor observed that “the southwestern border can be held and is being held against illegal immigration far more tightly than most people realize or have believed possible.”74 But control of the border, particularly control over undocumented Mexican border crossings, remained nebulous at decade’s end. An enlarged Border Patrol, newly focused on Mexican undocumented workers by 1929, produced increasing numbers of apprehensions. But just how far short that scheme of border control fell would not be seen for another decade. The economic collapse of 1929 and the intense hostility directed at Mexican immigrants in the early years of the Great Depression did far more than any border enforcement efforts to effectively mark 1929 as an end to three decades of Mexican immigration. But on the far side of the Great Depression the labor shortages of another war would create new demands for a border open to Mexican workers. And new generations of imaginative and determined migrants, driven by a resurgent binational labor market, would rise to the challenges of surreptitious entry.



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An Imagi nary Li ne: Change and Cont i nuit y on t he U. S .-Mexico Border

Epilogue

We sometimes wonder what they will spring on us next. William H. Whalen, “Mexican Border Problems,” 1929

On April 26, 1941, the El Paso Herald Post briefly related an episode at the international border that, in many ways, revealed the dramatic changes that had been wrought in the preceding decades. The story discussed the unusual circumstances under which Jose Morga, a Mexican citizen, had been barred from entry at the Santa Fe International Bridge linking El Paso, Texas, to Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. The sixty-eight-year-old Morga was apparently an obscure, longtime El Paso resident. He had come to El Paso from Mexico in 1899 as a twenty-six-year-old young man in search of work, crossing the border in the period before American inspectors regularly inspected and documented immigrant Mexicans. Forty-two years later, Morga boarded a Juarez-bound El Paso streetcar, intending to get off near his home in downtown El Paso before the trolley crossed the border into Mexico. But instead, perhaps after a long day’s work, he fell asleep on the streetcar and was carried unwittingly across the border into Juarez. Discovering himself suddenly back in Mexico, Morga attempted to re-cross into the United States at the port of entry on the Santa Fe Bridge. But because he had not become a naturalized American citizen and lacked either an immigrant passport or papers permitting local crossing, U.S. immigration officers denied him entry into the United States.1 Jose Morga’s fateful bus ride illustrates well one aspect of the changes that occurred along the U.S.-Mexico border in the early decades of the twentieth century. Between 1899 and 1941, the process and technical requirements of border crossing on the international border had been dramatically transformed. The brief newspaper account of Morga’s predicament, unsympathetically entitled “Oh Well! Why Not Stay in Old Mexico?” is the only published account of his travails, and it suggests that Morga, resigned to his fate, had decided to spend his last years living in Juarez. But there is good reason to doubt that was the actual result of his

misadventure. For alongside American border enforcement efforts there had also arisen pervasive traditions of undocumented entry. Morga, like thousands of potential immigrants from Mexico at the time, retained a host of options for illicitly reentering the United States. The degree to which the Mexican border—for all its inspectors and border patrol officers—remained virtually open to Mexican immigrants was about to become abundantly clear in the 1940s. Just eight months after the incident on the bridge, the United States again found itself in a world war. And, as in World War I, the United States found itself in need of additional sources of labor. During the early years of the 1930s, high rates of unemployment in the United States and overt hostility toward Mexican workers in many American communities had reversed the flow of Mexican migration. An estimated 400,000 Mexicans were repatriated—many against their will—in the opening years of the Depression, and Mexican immigration, either legal or undocumented, virtually dried up.2 But Mexican workers deemed undesirable in the 1930s had become quite desirable again by early 1942. The United States rushed from high unemployment to nearly full employment in the course of barely a year. Groups that had done much of the crop harvesting in the Southwest in the 1930s—white southern migrants, African Americans, and Mexican Americans—quickly found new opportunities in both the military service and the war industries springing up throughout the West.3 Within months of the American entry into the war, the nation was negotiating with the Mexican government to permit the passage of Mexican workers into the United States for agricultural work under contract. The workers would not be immigrants but guest workers who would return to Mexico at the conclusion of their work contract. On the basis of an April 1942 agreement with Mexico, the administration hastily erected the so-called Emergency Farm Labor Program in the summer of 1942. Under that program, Mexican farm workers entered into contracts with the U.S. government and were then distributed to farmers in need of labor. The first workers began arriving in California in September 1942. Under the auspices of the wartime Bracero program, which ran through 1947, Mexican laborers signed almost a quarter of a million work contracts. In the immediate postwar period, informal extensions kept the program, highly popular with many American farmers, in place until 1951. Thereafter, in June 1952, over the objections of many Americans, Congress formalized the program as a peacetime labor program. Between the program’s inception and its conclusion in 1964, more than four million individual work contracts brought Mexican workers into the United States.4

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Like the program of exemptions put in place during World War I, the Bracero program of the 1940s indirectly stimulated a massive amount of undocumented worker migration running parallel to documented worker migration. The Bracero program signaled the abundance of labor opportunities in the United States, and many Mexicans correctly inferred that abundant jobs would mean light enforcement of border-crossing restrictions. Precise figures on undocumented immigration for the period are impossible to come by, for obvious reasons, but officials at the time interpreted the sharp escalation in apprehensions of undocumented Mexican workers as evidence of increased illicit entry. In 1942, the Immigration and Naturalization Service reported apprehending 12,000 undocumented immigrants, mostly Mexicans. Two years later the figure had risen almost threefold, to 31,000. By 1947 it had swelled dramatically, to 194,000. The Bracero program had served as an informal announcement that Mexican workers were once again wanted north of the border, and hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers quickly opted to become braceros without contracts. From 1945 on, officials estimated that undocumented immigrants exceeded the number of contracted Bracero program workers. Between 1942 and 1952, 800,000 Mexicans entered the United States as braceros, while an estimated 2,000,000 entered without documents. Undocumented workers came in such numbers no doubt because braceros spread word of employment opportunities in the north. They came in ever-greater numbers after 1947 because American officials administering the Bracero program made a practice of immediately legalizing undocumented workers who were caught in agricultural work. In other words, the penalty for being caught engaged in agricultural labor as an undocumented alien was simply that you were enrolled in the Bracero program.5 At the same time, Border Patrol traditions of selectively overlooking undocumented farm workers appear to have continued. One former border patrolman who joined the service after World War II recalled hearing “old-timers” discuss the discretionary system whereby patrolmen at times ignored undocumented immigrants carrying a “Mexican passport.” When he inquired as to what exactly a Mexican passport was, he was told: Well, if he’s got a shovel over his shoulder or hoe, you don’t talk to him. He’s employed. You leave him alone. Or if he’s in a field you can’t talk to him because he’s in a field, and you have to only talk to him if he’s walking down the road and looks like he’s transient or just came in.6

The Bracero program, by involving millions of Mexican workers in a transnational labor market, firmly reestablished traditions of seasonal

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labor migration that would outlive the program itself. It familiarized a new generation of workers with the economic strategy of temporary work in el norte and had, by the 1950s, ensured the economic dependence of millions of Mexicans on the seasonal work of one or more family members in the United States. It was no great surprise that, when the program came to an end in 1965, undocumented Mexican immigration would swell and continue rising for the next decade. Mexican families dependent on remittances from the north could hardly reinvent their economic strategies overnight. And American farmers addicted to cheap labor were happy to accommodate them. Through the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond, the tradition of undocumented entry persisted. Once primed, the pump could not so simply be turned off.7 The wartime and postwar surge in undocumented immigration suggests the degree to which the administrative solutions imposed in 1929 had provided American immigration officials with only the illusion of control over the Mexican border. The economic downturn of the Great Depression and the collapse of an American market for surplus labor had done far more than American officials to restrain Mexican undocumented immigration. With the binational labor market revived in the 1940s, patterns of cross-border migration began to look like those of the 1910s and 1920s. How much, in fact, had the border changed? Experienced border officers were already asking that question in 1929. That year, when an exasperated but bemused U.S. immigration inspector addressed a conference of his colleagues in Washington, D.C., in January, he spoke with a mix of admiration and chagrin of the ingenuity and resourcefulness of immigrants attempting to circumvent U.S. immigration laws in the San Antonio, Texas, immigration district. In an hour-long address entitled “Mexican Border Problems,” William Whalen detailed the variety of ruses, disguises, deceptions, and tricks that northward immigrants, predominantly Mexican, had used with considerable success on inspectors at the U.S. border. “We sometimes wonder what they will spring on us next,” Whalen confessed. Inspector Whalen spoke from his experiences overseeing Immigration Service inspectors at South Texas ports of entry, but his comments might just as easily have reflected the sentiments of the immigration inspectors elsewhere along the southern U.S. border or of the newly commissioned Border Patrol agents that worked in the vast expanses in between formal ports of entry.8 After almost forty years of trying to establish and enforce border-crossing regulations on the U.S.-Mexico line, American authorities still had to recognize the limits

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of the control they could exercise over the border-crossing activities of migrants. To be sure, the development of an American border control regime between 1880 and 1930 involved both change and continuity. In some ways the Mexican border looked far different in 1930 than it had in 1890. Ferryboats no longer openly plied the Rio Grande in the lower valley, carrying workers, shoppers, and kin back and forth across the international line. Mexicans crossing the bridges at El Paso or Laredo could expect to be questioned before being allowed to pass into the United States. A federal Border Patrol force patrolled the vast international borderline, arresting and returning tens of thousands of undocumented aliens annually. And in general, the Immigration Service had made steady progress between 1890 and 1930 in its efforts to understand and counter the deceptive practices of excludable aliens trying to cross the border. But for every immigrant trick detected and defeated, another two seemed to appear; for every undocumented alien apprehended, countless others escaped detection.9 What, then, is the important story about the border’s development during this period? That the United States in fact, over the course of forty plus years, succeeded in creating an official border that formalized border crossings and policed the national identity? Or that as late as 1929— after almost forty years of trying to establish and enforce border-crossing regulations on the U.S.-Mexico line—American immigration authorities still spoke about effective border control as a future dream? The truth of the matter is that continuities prevailed, in sometimes stunning fashion. We discover not simply the same cast of characters in the 1880s and 1920s—determined, economically driven migrants, organized smuggling rings, professional border guides or coyotes, technology-obsessed federal enforcement officials—but also familiar themes and strategies: ingenuity, courage, subterfuge, pretense, blending. Far from achieving any long-term diminution in illicit border crossings during this period, enforcement officials had in fact witnessed steady growth in smuggling and undocumented entry. Although perseverant and at times optimistic, immigration authorities rarely deceived themselves about the overall inadequacy of their activities. Determined migrants, an attractive labor market, and a long border ultimately undermined efforts to fashion an effective system of control over cross-border migration along the southern boundary of the United States. It is difficult to escape the judgment that ordinary workers, attending to a de facto transnational labor market, preserved a permeable Mexican border through 1930—and that they have for almost a century now erased

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the lines being drawn in the southwestern desert. Of course, while Inspector Whalen gave credit to the migrants themselves in undermining the process of border inspection, there were equally important forces he might have acknowledged. The undocumented migrants who contested border restrictions after 1882 never operated in a vacuum. What drew workers to the United States was a market for cheap, unskilled labor, and that market had as much to do with erasing the border as the migrants themselves. The individual, informal efforts of migrants to evade the border occurred alongside highly orchestrated, formal and informal efforts by American employers to maintain their access to cheap labor. In turn, immigrants, migrant workers, and their American employers could hardly have undermined border enforcement efforts so easily during this period but for the physical and cultural geographies of the border itself. From the very start, the physical and cultural landscapes of the border played an important role in historical developments. The sheer size of the remote, physically challenging desert and mountain terrain gave a certain natural advantage to smugglers and undocumented immigrants in their efforts to elude border officials. The presence of ethnic Chinese and Japanese communities along the Mexican and Canadian borders made immigration enforcement difficult at the turn of the twentieth century. Mexicans, of course, enjoyed even greater success after the phenomenon of smuggling shifted to the south after 1900. In the most densely settled regions of the early twentieth-century borderlands, such as the Lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, nothing like a clear borderline could easily be imposed. Ethnically Mexican valley residents not only resisted (most visibly through the preservation of river ferries) the introduction of official ports of entry, they also made difficult the project of distinguishing the alien from the citizen. Examining the fates of the various U.S. initiatives to discipline or order this international border space not only provides insights on the origins of the contemporary border control regime but also on the innate qualities of borders, what Oscar Martinez has called “the normal functioning of borders.”10 But to suggest, as I do, that continued permeability lies at the heart of the story of the border’s development from 1882 through 1930 should not obscure the fact that the creation of a border control regime mattered. It mattered a great deal. We may regard it as something of a failure in fully enforcing the immigration laws so important to prevailing notions of American identity and at the same time still recognize that it did greatly influence migration patterns, the lives and health of migrant workers,

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ideas and practices of nationality, and identities in the borderlands and beyond. Certainly the creation of the border control regime was sound and fury signifying something. Let me make some suggestions as to where those meanings may lie. First, the immigration controls on American land borders unarguably did have a deterrent effect, immeasurable though it is, on migration patterns from the 1880s on. But for the requirement that immigrants stand for inspection at Buffalo or El Paso as well as at New York and Seattle, there is every reason to believe that many more migrants would have adopted the approach of English and Irish immigrants of the 1880s, taking the way around. Asian and European immigrants posed healthy challenges to the new border regimes put in place, but the presence of immigration authorities on the borders did inhibit the development of these alternative routes into the United States. For Mexican immigrants, the story is the same and different. As the historian George Sánchez has suggested, the articulation of bordercrossing requirements for Mexicans affected the formation of the Mexican-American community in the United States. By the mid-1920s, but especially after 1929, border enforcement activities acted as a deterrent for at least some aspiring Mexican immigrants and had diminished the Mexican-American practice of remigrating to Mexico for part of the year. In particular, they made it more difficult for family migration and remigration to occur.11 Had border-crossing restrictions been absent, the Mexican-American community in the United States might have developed in different ways. At the same time, as the work of David Gutiérrez shows, the contiguous and essentially permeable border lies at the very center of the Mexican-American experience. While immigration controls have no doubt deterred an untold number of aliens from entering the United States since the 1920s, it is obvious that millions, mostly Mexican, have crossed despite the border. Many have come only to work and subsequently return to Mexico. Others have come intending to settle. And many intending to sojourn ultimately settled in the United States as well. But all of these undocumented immigrants have, in one way or another, affected the social, cultural, and political lives of Mexican-American communities in the United States.12 One ought not underestimate the deterrent value of the border—nor overestimate it. Second, the application of immigration restrictions to Mexicans and their enforcement at the border and beyond would, over the course of the century, effectively criminalize large segments of the Mexican migratory labor force employed by American agriculture. Workers might still easily

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enough enter the United States after the 1920s, but by virtue of having done so “illegally” they clouded their opportunities and experiences in the north. As Ernesto Galarza and Jorge Bustamante have argued, American policing of the border became one of the essential “rules of the game” of the U.S. labor market for Mexican workers, with legacies of exploitation, poverty, and marginalization for generations of migrant workers. Their undocumented status not only made workers susceptible to all sorts of employer abuse, for the most part it limited their capacities for protest and organization.13 This peculiar position of Mexican labor migrants, derived from the proximity of Mexico, allowed U.S. corporate agriculture to avail itself of cheap Mexican labor in a way that could hardly have been better suited to industry needs. For both migratory Mexican laborers and immigrant Mexicans after 1929, exploitation as undocumented workers was not the only new danger engendered by border enforcement efforts. Crossing the border itself became increasingly difficult as well. From the 1880s on, immigration officials on the Mexican border adopted a strategy of using the physical geography and harsh environment of the borderlands as part of their border defense. By positioning patrols on well-traveled routes, they compel undocumented entrants to take riskier courses. In effect, the strategy forces immigrants into the hands of smugglers or the desert, and sometimes both. Smugglers then, as now, frequently had few scruples and regularly robbed or otherwise abused their clients. And for over a century, accounts of immigrants perishing in the southwestern desert have been commonplace. The 1891 image of a Chinese “coolie” dying of thirst in the desert, drawn by the renowned Frederic Remington, was a startling discovery in the course of this research. That the strategy of making illicit entry dangerous has become a successful weapon in the arsenal of the Immigration and Naturalization Service is evidenced by the fact that the agency in the late 1990s began conducting “search and rescue missions” to aid migrants “abandoned by smugglers or traveling with too little water and food through deserts.” In these ways as well, the border has mattered greatly, enticing Mexican immigrants to pay the price for an American addiction to cheap labor.14 A fourth observation comes from looking more closely at the borderlands itself, not simply as a point of passage but as a region. It seems incontrovertible that American border enforcement has always been racialized. That is, race as a marker has always mattered at the American border. Given the nature of American immigration restrictions at the turn of the century, and in particular the obsession with Asian immigration, it is not

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surprising that the first federal officials stationed at the border to monitor immigration in the 1880s were principally attuned to the differences of race and ever vigilant for markers of difference. Eager immigrants—first Chinese, then Southern European and Japanese immigrants, and later still Mexicans—quickly learned how to manipulate those markers and play on inspectors’ ideas about race, but their successes are only part of the story. Another side is how the matter of race became situated in the development of bureaucratic traditions of surveillance and policing, traditions that came to reside in the U.S. Border Patrol after 1924. The development of this particular culture of official surveillance has certainly affected the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, a region where crude notions of ethnicity have never served well as an indicator of citizenship or belonging. For Mexican Americans living in the southern border regions in this century, this culture of surveillance has sometimes represented an insult, sometimes a hassle, even at times a menace. (And, yes, sometimes an employment opportunity.) Mexican Americans living in the borderlands have learned to avoid unwanted attention from la migra by adopting markers—of clothing, dress, and demeanor—to distinguish themselves from the recently arrived.15 In just such a way the border, with its emphasis on appearances, has cast a shadow on identities in the borderlands. Finally, border enforcement, incomplete though it had always been, has had profound long-term impacts on the Mexican side of the border. In the context of high rates of Mexican immigration after World War II, American border enforcement efforts contributed to the problems of urban growth, social instability, and poverty in places such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez. In this sense a book such as Luis Alberto Urrea’s disturbing account of Tijuana life, Across the Wire, is an integral part of the history of American border enforcement.16 I began this research in the 1990s during a period of remarkable reconceptualizations of United States–Mexican relations, most pronounced in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) but evident elsewhere as well. As part of those changes, the meanings and practices of the border also came up for discussion and reevaluation. In this atmosphere a new generation of activists, academics, and artists asked hard questions about the purposes, consequences, and costs of enforcing national goals on what the author and activist Carey McWilliams once called “one of the most unrealistic borders in the Western Hemisphere.” As my research progressed, the politics of immigration thickened. NAFTA and the 1994 passage of Proposition 187 in California, which prohibited the provision of publicly

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funded education and social services to undocumented immigrants, directed increased attention to the politics and history of the border. At the same time, the Clinton administration launched high-profile border enforcement initiatives, including the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s “Operation Hold-the-Line” and “Operation Gatekeeper,” which sought to deter undocumented alien entry near El Paso and San Diego.17 Of course, those border enforcement crackdowns largely shifted undocumented entry and smuggling to new places along the border. As I settled into a teaching position in California after 2000, the immigration issue—and the border—began to roil. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the meanings of the border changed again. As had been true in both world wars and the cold war, wartime anxieties accentuated concerns about the nation’s physical borders. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, this increased anxiety about porous borders, combined with a rising nativist mood in the nation, proved to be a potent political combination. The folding of customs and immigration enforcement into the Department of Homeland Security was one result. The political spotlight focused on “illegal immigration” led to the development of vigilante border patrols (the Minutemen Project), the federal use of National Guard troops to help secure the border, a renewed attention to workplace enforcement, and even a successful effort in Congress to mandate the construction of physical walls to separate portions of the United States from Mexico. As of summer 2008, advocates for tougher border policies were suggesting that such initiatives were responsible for reported declines in Mexican undocumented entry. Others pointed to the nation’s economic downturn for an explanation. These developments have again placed before American citizens and policymakers the vexing problems of border enforcement. Very few believe that the construction of a physical border wall will have any appreciable effect on immigration flows. Are there alternatives to administering the border as a barrier to labor migration? Are there alternatives to spending vast sums on the Sisyphean task of border enforcement? Looking at the evaporation of border-crossing regulations in the European Union in the 1990s briefly gave cause for hope. But it soon became clear that the European community expected Spain and Italy to patrol their respective borders against the ingress of unskilled migrants from the developing areas of Africa, Southeastern Europe, and Asia. My research by no means offers clear answers. In a way, it simply bears out Carey McWilliams’s observation. An unrealistic border has created unrealistic expectations for an unrealistic and ever more expensive program of border en

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forcement. In the meantime, generations of migrants have tried to define the border on their own terms and, in so doing, preserved a permeable border. And we are left with an enigmatic sense that the official border is at once the most prominent feature of the borderlands and yet, for many a determined worker, surmountable.



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Notes

Introduction 1. George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 2. Kitty Calavita, U.S. Immigration Law and the Control of Labor: 1820–1924 (London: Academic Press, 1984), 133–137. 3. Keith Fitzgerald, The Face of the Nation: Immigration, the State, and National Identity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 95, 143. 4. Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1949); Mark Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow: Mexican Immigrant Labor in the United States, 1900–1940 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1976); Ernesto Galarza, Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story (Charlotte, NC: McNally and Loftin, 1964); Lawrence Cardoso, Mexican Emigration to the United States, 1897–1931 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980); David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987); Devra Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994); Cletus Daniel, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers, 1870–1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981); and Camille Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900–1939 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994). It is no little irony that the demand for Mexican laborers to ignore the border and come north for work arose directly from the exclusion of Chinese and Japanese workers. American efforts to enforce the exclusions of Asian immigrants led to efforts to seal the Mexican border against the smuggling of Asian immigrants; at the same time, those exclusions created a labor vacuum in the West that created demands that the border remain virtually open to Mexicans. 5. Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), esp. 151– 187. Lee and I independently examined much of the same research material relating to Chinese on the borders during our studies. An earlier, close study of Chinese border smuggling was Lawrence Douglas Taylor Hansen, “El contrabando

de chinos a lo largo de la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos, 1882–1931,” Frontera Norte 6 ( January–June 1994): 41–57. 6. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 50. 7. Alexandra Minna Stern, “Buildings, Boundaries, and Blood: Medicalization and Nation-Building on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1910–1930,” Hispanic American Historical Review 79, no. 1 (1999): 41–81. 8. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 4 (emphasis in the original), 64. Hers is part of a growing body of scholarship that effectively ar‑ gues for the importance of race in the history of U.S. immigration policy. See also Lee, At America’s Gates; Paul Spickard, Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity (New York: Routledge, 2007); and Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 9. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 66. In this regard, her conclusions also diverge in part from those of Erika Lee, who sees a successful federal crackdown on Chinese border smuggling by 1917. 10. For an excellent overview of migration controls in the international context, see Aristide R. Zolberg, “Global Movements, Global Walls: Responses to Migrations, 1885–1925,” in Global History and Migrations, ed. Wang Gungwu (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997), 279–307. See also John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 10. 11. Zolberg, “Global Movements, Global Walls,” 303. 12. Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), xiv. 13. Lee, At America’s Gates, 6. 14. See, for example, Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; and Thomas Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 15. See Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 3. Zolberg argues that scholars have neglected the degree to which efforts to control immigration into the United States existed in the decades before 1882. American immigration controls, he suggests, are best understood within the framework of nation-building. 16. Lee, At America’s Gates, 249, 21; Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 5. 17. Spickard, Almost All Aliens, 11. 18. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987), 222. 19. Truett and Young, Continental Crossroads, 20.



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20. Ibid., 13, 2. 21. Michiel Baud and William Van Schendel, “Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands,” Journal of World History 8, no. 2 (1997): 220, 215. 22. Oscar J. Martinez, Troublesome Border (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988), 4–5; Jorge Bustamante, “Frontera México–Estados Unidos: Reflexiones para un marco teórico,” Frontera Norte 1, no. 1 (1989): 7–24. 23. Oscar J. Martinez, Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), 311–312. 24. Wayne A. Cornelius, Introduction, in Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective, ed. Wayne A. Cornelius, Philip L. Martin, and James F. Hollifield (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 4. 25. Wayne A. Cornelius, “Mexican Immigration to the United States: The Limits of Government Intervention,” Working Papers in U.S.-Mexican Studies 5 (1981): 1. Part of the problem is that pluralistic democracies such as the United States, in which differing interest groups create conflicted and shifting immigration policies, send mixed signals to sending communities. In the case of the United States’ relationship with Mexican workers, those mixed signals have involved waxing and waning official tolerance of undocumented immigration. Cornelius, Introduction, 4. My research suggests that those mixed signals began to be read by Mexican workers as early as the 1900s, when American immigration authorities began to apply, with an inconsistency intimately related to labor demand, immigration laws to arriving Mexicans. 26. On the importance of the contiguous border, see, for example, Mario T. García, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, & Identity, 1930–1960 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 7, 13; idem, “La Frontera: The Border as Symbol and Reality in Mexican American Thought,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 1 (Summer 1985): 196–205; idem, Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880–1920 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 1–5; Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 38; and David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 5–6.

Chapter One 1. Mario T. García, Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880–1920 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 14. 2. Congressional Record, 47th Cong., 1st sess., May 2, 1882, 3644. 3. García, Desert Immigrants, 19. 4. Congressional Record, 51st Cong., 2d sess., December 1, 1890, 3. 5. New York Times, December 4, 1891. 6. Congressional Record, 52d Cong., 1st sess., December 9, 1891, 15. 7. Juxtaposed as they were with enthusiasm for open binational trade across the border, these fears about illegal border crossing also suggest parallels to late



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twentieth-century debates over Mexican immigration and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). 8. Marilyn C. Baseler, “Asylum for Mankind”: American, 1607–1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 70, 194–197. Following the lead of Roger Daniels and Erika Lee, I see the years preceding 1882 as a period of limited federal involvement in immigration policy. As noted earlier, Aristide Zolberg argues for the importance of policymaking efforts during this earlier period in his A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 9. Jefferson quoted in Baseler, “Asylum for Mankind”, 150; Marion T. Bennett, American Immigration Policies: A History (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1963), 7–8. Indeed, as Bennett notes, the American Declaration of Independence had included an indictment of the king of England for inhibiting immigration to the American colonies. Baseler, “Asylum for Mankind”, 331, 7, 196. Baseler’s work offers an extended discussion of colonial attitudes toward immigration and the American Revolution’s effect on American notions of asylum. For a thorough analysis of how shifting notions of “whiteness” shaped attitudes toward European immigrants in this period and later, see Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 10. Baseler, “Asylum for Mankind”, 331. 11. Bennett, American Immigration Policies, 7; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 8. 12. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 6. 13. The historian John Higham identified antiradicalism, anti-Catholicism, and a belief in Anglo-Saxon racial superiority as the principal impulses that motivated nineteenth-century nativist movements and undergirded proposals for immigration restriction. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 3–11. For an account that stresses the importance of evolving racial ideas in American immigration policy, see Paul Spickard, Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity (New York: Routledge, 2007). 14. Michael C. LeMay, From Open Door to Dutch Door: An Analysis of U.S. Immigration Policy since 1820 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1987), 9–10, 30–33. On the “medicalization of pre-existing nativist prejudices” and the association of the Irish with disease, see Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the Immigrant Menace (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 2, 32; Bennett, American Immigration Policies, 12–13; E. P. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 1798–1965 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 27–29. On the eagerness of industrial leaders, railroad concerns, and western states for a continued flow of immigrants through the middle decades of the nineteenth century, see Higham, Strangers in the Land, 14–19. 15. Roy L. Garis, Immigration Restriction: A Study of the Opposition to and Regu-



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lation of Immigration into the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 35–37. Numerous works offer accounts of federal immigration policy during the period of unrestricted immigration. Zolberg’s A Nation by Design is the most recent and most comprehensive in scope. But among the more comprehensive are Bennett, American Immigration Policies; Garis, Immigration Restriction; and Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy. See also Thomas J. Curran, Xenophobia and Immigration, 1820–1930 (Boston: Twayne, 1975), and Higham, Strangers in the Land. A comprehensive account of immigration policy since 1882 can be found in Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003). A solid review can also be found in Otis Graham’s historical polemic against current immigration policy, Unguarded Gates: A History of America’s Immigration Crisis (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). 16. Roger Daniels, Not Like Us: Immigrants and Minorities in America, 1890– 1924 (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1997), 10; Bennett, American Immigration Policies, 1–14; Henderson v. Mayor of the City of New York (92 U.S. 259); Sharon D. Masanz, History of the Immigration and Naturalization Service: A Report Prepared at the Request of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Chairman, Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, for the Use of the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1980), 6–7. 17. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 44. 18. Bennett, American Immigration Policies, 11n13, 13; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 14; Keith A. Fitzgerald, The Face of the Nation: Immigration, the State, and National Identity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 102–114. Under the provisions of the 1864 law, American employers could ease the economic burden of immigrants by paying the costs of their passage in exchange for a term of their labor upon arrival. 19. Bennett, American Immigration Policies, 16–19; LeMay, From Open Door to Dutch Door, 35. See also George Anthony Peffer, If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration before Exclusion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 20. John Higham points to the social and economic tensions of the 1870s and 1880s to explain the rise of “modern American nativism” in the 1880s. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 35–67, esp. 58. For a broader interpretation of nativism and racism during this period in American history, see Daniels, Not Like Us. For a more complicated picture of race and European ethnics, see Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color. 21. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 35–67, esp. 52, 38–39; Curran, Xenophobia and Immigration, 94; William S. Bernard, American Immigration Policy: A Reappraisal (New York: Harper and Row, 1950), 8–9. For the shifting attitudes of industrial leaders, see especially Morrell Heald, “Business Attitudes toward European Immigration, 1880–1900,” Journal of Economic History 13 (Summer 1953): 291–304.



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22. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 38–42, esp. 39, 41. 23. Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 10–11. 24. Ibid., 11. 25. Quoted in Daniels, Not Like Us, 19. 26. Maldwyn Allen Jones, American Immigration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 252. 27. Jones, American Immigration, 258. 28. According to one of the bill’s supporters, the money collected from the head tax was to be used “to create a fund to be used of protecting and caring for [immigrants] when they arrive in the ports of this country, until they can proceed to other places or obtain occupation for their support.” Congressional Record, 47th Cong., 1st sess., June 19, 1882, 5106. 29. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 80–84. On pauperism in the debates about immigrant labor, see Kitty Calavita, U.S. Immigration Law and the Control of Labor: 1820–1924 (London: Academic Press, 1984), 66–71. 30. Congressional Record, 47th Cong., 1st sess., June 19, 1882, 5109. 31. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 25, 27–28, 33, 42, 85. For a discussion of pauper and convict immigration in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, see Garis, Immigration Restriction, 34–58. 32. Garis reports that assisted migration of Irish paupers to the United States persisted into the early 1880s. Garis, Immigration Restriction, 44. 33. George M. Stephenson, A History of American Immigration, 1820–1924 (Boston: Ginn, 1926), 27. 34. Ibid., 27, 24. 35. Congressional Record, 47th Cong., 1st sess., June 19, 1882, 5109. 36. Ibid., 5108. 37. Garis, Immigration Restriction, 44. 38. Ibid., 39. 39. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 39–40. Congressional Record, 47th Cong., 1st sess., June 19, 1882, 5110. In subsequent decades Congress would address issues related to the physical health of immigrants and their role in the spread of disease. For a fuller discussion of these, see Kraut, Silent Travelers. 40. Congressional Record, 47th Cong., 1st sess., June 19, 1882, 5108. 41. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 64; Congressional Record, 47th Cong., 1st sess., June 19, 1882, 5108. 42. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 66. This act, although quite narrow in focus compared to the 1882 Immigration Act, actually initiated federal designation of excludable classes of foreigners. Its provisions principally targeted Chinese immigration, especially the immigration of Chinese



184

Notes to pages 19–24

prostitutes. In keeping with the vision of America as an exile, neither of these bans on convict immigration applied to individuals convicted of political crimes. 43. Jones, American Immigration, 250. 44. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 79. As will be discussed in the next chapter, all enforcement activities were to be the province of state authorities acting under the supervision of the secretary of the treasury. 45. Congressional Record, 47th Cong., 1st sess., June 19, 1882, 5107. 46. Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 7–31, esp. 7–16. Chinese immigration to the United States during the latter half of the nineteenth century was part of a larger diaspora that scattered Chinese immigrants throughout the Americas, West Indies, Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Complex push and pull factors related to the expansion of Western capitalism stimulated extensive migration that carried two and a half million Chinese overseas between 1840 and 1900. Population pressures, coupled with a series of natural disasters from the 1830s on, had made life in the hilly coastal provinces of Guangdong and Fujian more difficult than usual for the Cantonese peasants. Political turmoil and revolts added to a climate of crisis. As a result, many families adopted survival strategies that relied on the income of sons and husbands working temporarily overseas. See Chan, This Bittersweet Soil, 7–16; Shih-shan Henry Tsai, The Chinese Experience in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 2–3; and Gunther Paul Barth, Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States, 1850–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 1–31, esp. 27. 47. Chan, This Bittersweet Soil, 21. 48. Tsai, The Chinese Experience in America, 5. 49. Chan, This Bittersweet Soil, 21–25; Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 79; Barth, Bitter Strength, 64–65; William L. Tung, The Chinese in America, 1820–1973: A Chronology & Fact Book (Hobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, 1974), 8. 50. Chan, This Bittersweet Soil, viii; Barth, Bitter Strength, 29–31; Alexander Saxton, Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 17. Between 1850 and 1882, 330,000 Chinese entered the United States and 150,000, or 47 percent, returned. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 116. 51. Barth, Bitter Strength, 50–76, esp. 55–59; Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 35–36; Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 3–10, esp. 8; Tsai, The Chinese Experience in America, 8; Mary Roberts Coolidge, Chinese Immigration (New York: Holt, 1909), 41. 52. Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 3–8; Chan, This Bittersweet Soil, 38–40. For a more extensive discussion of patterns of Chinese employment, see Chan, This Bittersweet Soil, 42–78.



Notes to pages 24–27

185

53. This urbanization reflected the increase of manufacturing opportunities in the city as well as the movement of many Chinese immigrants into laundry works and domestic service. In 1860, San Francisco’s Chinese community represented only 8 percent of the Chinese in the state; by 1880, the city accounted for 30 percent of the state’s Chinese population. Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 3–5; Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 79–131, esp. 87–90. 54. Chan, This Bittersweet Soil, 58; Barth, Bitter Strength, 129–37. For an extended discussion of the Chinese experience in the mines, see Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 46–66. The violence that Chinese encountered in California is well recounted in Jean Pfaelzer’s Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans (New York: Random House, 2007). For a broader view of anti-Chinese violence during this period, see Roger Daniels, ed., Anti-Chinese Violence in North America (New York: Arno, 1978). 55. In San Francisco, that percentage was closer to 33 percent, and the Chinese became a “highly visible segment” of the workforce. Between 1860 and 1870 the city’s overall population more than doubled, from 57,000 to 150,000, as both white and Chinese miners returned to the city in search of wage labor. When the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, another 10,000 workers filtered back to the city. As a result, unemployment ran high, and employers depressed wages and lengthened the workday. Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 7; Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875–1920 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 74–75. Ronald Takaki notes that Chinese represented 46 percent of the labor force in the key industries of boots, woolens, cigars, and sewing in 1860s San Francisco. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 87. 56. Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 5–6; Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants, 74–77. Chinese workers, because they were unmarried and scrupulously saving money for their return home, were able to live more cheaply than white workers and subsequently could accept lower wages. Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 6. 57. Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants, 75. Saxton notes that this was the first time that the Chinese had been employed in a labor market characterized by scarcity. Their work in rural settings, as in agricultural and railroad work, engendered less opposition. Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 5. 58. Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 72–73; Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 8–9; Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants, 75. Economic elites supported the 1868 Burlingame Treaty with China, which recognized the rights of immigration between the two nations and kept open the door for trade with China. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 8–9. In 1870 the Southern Pacific Railway had announced a hiring policy favorable to Chinese. Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants, 75. 59. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 8–9; Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants, 82; Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 112–137. Both Saxton and Mink argue that antiChinese slogans became the glue that bound the nascent trade-union movement in California.



186

Notes to pages 27–28

60. Erika Lee’s At America’s Gates provides the best historical account of the creation and enforcement of the Chinese exclusion laws. 61. Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, 83. Miller quoted in Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 15. 62. For an account of those who argued that the Chinese “degraded” American workers because they, as single men, could afford to work for wages below the standard of an American family, see Scott Wong, “Cultural Defenders and Brokers: Chinese Response to the Anti-Chinese Movement,” in Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities during the Exclusion Era, ed. K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 5. 63. Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, 83. 64. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 10; Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 101. 65. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 10. 66. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 101; Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 11. 67. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 13. 68. Wong, “Cultural Defenders,” 7; Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 102. 69. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 13. 70. Ibid., 11–12. 71. Chan, This Bittersweet Soil, 40–41. For a more thorough account of the investigation by the California Senate, see Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, 83–95. 72. Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, 87; Wong, “Cultural Defenders,” 6. 73. Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, 96. 74. The use of Chinese strikebreakers in the Massachusetts shoe industry in 1870 had alarmed East Coast labor leaders. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 94–98, 101–112. For an excellent source of information on visual images of the Chinese during this period, see Philip P. Choy, Lorraine Dong, and Larlon K. Hom, Coming Man: 19th Century American Perceptions of the Chinese (Hong Kong: Joint Publishers, 1994). 75. Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development, 103; Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 14. 76. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 65. A full legislative history of federal legislative initiatives aimed at the Chinese can be gleaned from Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 34–85. 77. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 13. Despite the treaty, a Democrat-controlled Congress passed the Fifteen Passenger Bill in 1879, which would have restricted steamships to carrying fifteen or fewer Chinese passengers on each voyage to the United States. It suffered a presidential veto from President Rutherford B. Hayes, which he justified as necessary, given the terms of the Burlingame Treaty. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 75–81.



Notes to pages 28–30

187

78. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 75–81. 79. Ibid., 82; Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 15. 80. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 16. 81. For a more complete discussion of this litigation and of the larger dynamic between Chinese immigration and the development of American immigration laws, see Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, esp. 20–22. Salyer notes that Treasury Department officials in 1888 concluded that 4,091 Chinese had filed habeus corpus petitions with the federal court in San Francisco and that 85 percent had received a favorable response. Ibid., 20. 82. Ibid., 21–22. 83. Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants, 72, 77, 108. 84. Charlotte Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 1860– 1885 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 148–166; Calavita, U.S. Immigration Law, 45–46. 85. Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 69, 99–105; Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants, 41, 61, 63. Some American industrial concerns retained recruiting agents in Europe and advertised employment opportunities there and in Asia, although most of the work of labor recruitment to the United States was undertaken informally by other institutions and only rarely involved labor contracts. Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 32–45, 67–87, 115, 121; Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants, 54, 63. 86. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 47–48; Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants, 63; Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 122: Calavita, U.S. Immigration Law, 51. New York labor agencies had, in fact, been providing the strikebreaking Italian and Hungarian workers to Pennsylvania mine operators through the 1870s. Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 115, 121. Still, there were many instances of employers contracting abroad for workers in the 1860s and 1870s. Those employers that did use workers contracted abroad appear to have done so in order to acquire workers with specific skills, sometimes in the context of labor unrest, sometimes not. For a brief period of time in the 1860s the federal 1864 contract labor law had provided federal oversight of arrangements whereby U.S. employers could pay the transportation costs of prospective workers in exchange for a contractually agreed-upon term of service. The law had been passed to ease labor shortages during the Civil War, but it was repealed in 1868 at the insistence of labor advocates when rising postwar flows of immigrant workers had obviated the need for immigration incentives. But the practice of contracting for workers overseas remained legal and continued in subsequent years. The patterns of recruitment revolved around skilled crafts rather than unskilled workers. For instance, through the 1860s New England cotton manufacturers, Pennsylvania steel and iron works, and copper mines in the Lake Superior region all invested in skilled European workers, procured by means of employment contracts signed overseas. In 1881 Milwaukee cigar manufacturers



188

Notes to pages 30–32

faced with a striking work force threatened to import skilled cigar makers directly from Bohemia. Ultimately, many employers were discouraged with the results of importing workers under contract. Many European workers contracted abroad to serve as strike breakers refused to cross picket lines once they understood the context of their recruitment. In addition, many skilled workers in whom employers had invested, once they reached the States and assessed the favorable market for their services, defaulted on their contracts. For a fuller discussion of labor contracting during this period, see Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 49, 53; Stephenson, History of American Immigration, 137–139; Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 32–48, 137–147, 150–154; and Calavita, U.S. Immigration Law, 44–46. 87. Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 140, 145. 88. Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 156–157; Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 87. 89. Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 158–166. 90. Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 157–166. On the anxiety of workers during this period, see Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants, 39–51. For an interpretation of the Foran Act as simply a “symbolic law,” see Calavita, U.S. Immigration Law, 43–66, esp. 55. 91. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 46; Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 87. 92. Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 157–161. 93. Congressional Record, 48 Cong., 1st sess., 5349–5351. 94. Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 161, 165; Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants, 64. 95. Calavita, U.S. Immigration Law, 56–59; Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants, 64; Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 87–88. 96. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 88–89. 97. Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 167–186. 98. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 45–46.

Chapter Two 1. New York Times, July 10, 1883, 3. 2. New York Times, August 9, 1883, 3. 3. Maldwyn Allen Jones, American Immigration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 263; House Select Committee on Investigation of Foreign Immigration, To Regulate Immigration, 50th Cong., 2d sess., 1889, H. Rep. 3792, 1–2; House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Immigration Investigation, 51st Cong., 2d sess., 1891, H. Rep. 3472, ii–iii. 4. House Select Committee on Investigation of Foreign Immigration, To Regulate Immigration, 2; idem, Hearings on the Importation of Contract Laborers, Paupers, Convicts, and Other Classes, 50th Cong., 2d sess., 1889, 268. Three-quarters of



Notes to pages 32–39

189

American immigrants would land at Castle Garden in 1889. As many as 9,000 immigrants might pass through the port on a busy day, further taxing the inspection staff. Idem, To Regulate Immigration, 2. 5. House Select Committee on Investigation of Foreign Immigration, To Regulate Immigration, 2; idem, Hearings on the Importation of Contract Laborers, 274. 6. House Select Committee on Investigation of Foreign Immigration, Hearings on the Importation of Contract Laborers, 548. Of the 107 immigrants denied entry, 47 were deemed to be paupers, 3 lunatics, 1 a convict, and 46 contract laborers. The voluminous testimony presented to the Ford Committee contains numerous charges that excludable aliens who eluded detection at Castle Garden ended up on public relief in New York and elsewhere. See, for instance, op. cit., 273–283, 549. 7. Charlotte Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 1860– 1885 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 168–169. The following year, recognizing the difficulty that such inspectors faced in proving an immigrant’s contract status at the point of inspection, Congress provided that immigrant workers discovered to have come to the United States under contract could be deported within a year of their immigration. Ibid. Kitty Calavita, U.S. Immigration Law and the Control of Labor: 1820–1924 (London: Academic Press, 1984), 61–62. 8. House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Hearings on Immigration Investigation, 51st Cong., 2d sess., 1890, 912. 9. Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 169–170. “Hearings before the Industrial Commission on the Subject of Immigration,” in U.S. Industrial Commission, Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration; including Testimony with Review and Digest (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), 137–145; House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Immigration Investigation, v; Calavita, U.S. Immigration Law, 59. 10. Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 18. 11. Ibid., 18–21. 12. Ibid., 19; Mary Roberts Coolidge, Chinese Immigration (New York: Holt, 1909), 184–185. 13. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 18–20. 14. Ibid., 21. 15. For an excellent discussion of the anti-Chinese climate leading to such exaggerated claims, see Ibid., 45. 16. Ibid., 18–20. 17. Stephan Thernstrom, ed., Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1980), s.v. “Canadians, British.”



190

Notes to pages 39–42

18. “Immigration Act of August 3, 1882,” in U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Immigration: Laws and Regulations, 1906 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906), 20. 19. Congressional Record, 47th Cong., 1st sess., June 19, 1882, 5110–5111. 20. Congressional Record, 4th Cong., 1st sess., June 19, 1882, 5112; H. Rep. 5669, 47th Cong., 1st sess., April 6, 1882. This provision for deportation of immigrants who became public charges was modeled directly on a small program that had been overseen by the New York State Board of Emigration since 1880. See Congressional Record, 47th Cong., 1st sess., June 19, 1882, 5110. 21. House Select Committee on Investigation of Foreign Immigration, Hearings on the Importation of Contract Laborers, 263. 22. For its first two years, the law was applied to noncitizens entering the United States from either Canada or Mexico over water (the Great Lakes or the Gulf of Mexico). But in 1884, maritime interests persuaded Congress to amend the law so that maritime passengers, like land passengers, would be exempt from the head tax and inspection provisions. E. P. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 1798–1965 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 88. 23. Congressional Record, 47th Cong., 1st sess., 5110–5111; New York Times, July 10, 1883, 3. 24. House Select Committee on Investigation of Foreign Immigration, Hearings on the Importation of Contract Laborers, 238–239, 240a; Congressional Record, 48th Cong., 1st sess., December 4, 1883, 20. 25. House Select Committee on Investigation of Foreign Immigration, Hearings on the Importation of Contract Laborers, 238–239, 240a. 26. Ibid., 240, 559. 27. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Annual Report of the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury on the State of the Finances for the Year 1889 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1889), 93. The problem of pauper border crossings extended beyond the Northeast. Both Hoyt and Wrightington testified that many British emigrants to Canada first traveled west by rail before entering the United States at Buffalo and Port Huron, Michigan. Wrightington called the immigrants entering by way of western New York and Michigan the “least desireable of all the emigrants that you ever saw.” House Select Committee on Investigation of Foreign Immigration, Hearings on the Importation of Contract Laborers, 239, 559. 28. New York Times, August 26, 1885, 3. 29. New York Times, May 2, 1891, 1. 30. It is likely that convicts, like barred contract laborers, found it unnecessary to take the circuitous route through Canada in order to pass into the United States. They had only to deny being a convicted felon in order to escape detection. See House Select Committee on Investigation of Foreign Immigration, Hearings on the Importation of Contract Laborers, 923. 31. Ibid., 636.



Notes to pages 43–45

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32. Ibid., 636. 33. Ibid., 273. 34. House, Regulating Immigration, 49th Cong., 1st sess., 1886, H. Ex. Doc. 141, 2. 35. House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Hearings on Immigration Investigation, 921–922. 36. House Select Committee on Investigation of Foreign Immigration, To Regulate Immigration, 3. 37. Ibid., 3. 38. David Chuenyan Lai, Chinatowns: Towns within Cities in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1988), 16, 21. 39. Lai, Chinatowns, 31–32. 40. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 18. 41. New York Times, August 9, 1883, 3. 42. New York Times, October 22, 1883, 1. 43. New York Times, October 4, 1883, 1. 44. Testimony from the 1890 hearings appears in House Select Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Chinese Immigration, 51st Cong., 2d sess., 1891, H. Rep. 4048, 66; and Julian Ralph, “The Chinese Leak,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, March 1891, 520. For the claim that thousands of Chinese had already been smuggled into the United States by July 1884, see New York Times, July 7, 1884, 2. For a discussion of how anti-Chinese fervor inflated estimates of illegal immigration, see Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 44–45. 45. House Select Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Chinese Immigration, 24–25, 63, 78, 92, 105, 164; Ralph, “Chinese Leak,” 521. 46. House Select Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Chinese Immigration, 24–25, 63, 78, 92, 100, 105, 164; Ralph, “Chinese Leak,” 523. 47. House Select Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Chinese Immigration, 67. 48. Opium was subject to a high tariff in the United States. Ibid., 22. Customs officials testifying before the congressional committee in 1890 could not provide evidence of the complicity of the Six Companies. 49. New York Times, July 7, 1884, 2. 50. Herbert Beecher to Secretary of the Treasury, July 7, 1887, Entry 134, Custom Case File 3359d, “Miscelleaneous Records Related to Chinese Immigration, 1877–1891,” Box 9, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85, National Archives, Washington, D.C. For an excellent case study of one Portland-based opium- and immigrant-smuggling ring that involved white and Chinese partners, see Sarah M. Griffith, “Border Crossings: Race, Class, and Smuggling in Pacific Coast Chinese Immigrant Society,” Western Historical Quarterly 35 (Winter 2004): 473–492. 51. Lai, Chinatowns, 21, 31, 43. 52. New York Times, October 22, 1883, 1; July 7, 1884, 2.



192

Notes to pages 45–52

53. In 1890, only four customs inspectors assigned as Chinese inspectors to the Washington Customs District patrolled the 200-mile land boundary east of the Cascades. House Select Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Chinese Immigration, 18, 64. 54. Ralph, “Chinese Leak,” 520. 55. Authorities believed most of these guides were whites. Ibid., 519; House Select Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Chinese Immigration, 21. 56. House Select Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Chinese Immigration, 23. 57. Ibid., 20, 26, 19. 58. Ibid., 19. 59. Calavita, U.S. Immigration Law, 115. 60. New York Times, March 7, 1890. 61. New York Times, June 10, 1891. Smugglers here adopted a scheme that was becoming familiar to maritime immigration authorities as well. Because the immigration restrictions in place in the 1880s principally targeted poor and workingclass migrants, inspectors adopted class-sensitive inspection routines. When ocean steamers landed at Castle Garden and elsewhere, immigration inspectors gave only the most cursory of glances at passengers traveling in cabins and focused on steerage-class arrivals. Barred immigrants seeking to avoid inspection could, if they could afford to, improve their chance of entering the country by booking cabin-class accommodations. 62. New York Times, August 6, 1890, 4. 63. House Select Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Chinese Immigration, 26, 21. 64. Ibid., 21, 69. Many inspectors confessed great difficulty in distinguishing between individuals of Chinese descent. The belief that all Chinese “looked alike” was widespread through the period. A New York Times editorial writer suggested that the “indistinguishableness of the Chinese immigrants” was their greatest asset in subverting American law. “It seems no devices short of a number label padlocked into a certified Chinaman’s ear or nose will enable us to repel the invasion” of undocumented Chinese. New York Times, August 26, 1885, 4. House Select Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Chinese Immigration, 13. 65. Ralph, “Chinese Leak,” 523; House Select Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Chinese Immigration, 23–24, 69. 66. José Jorge Gomez Izquierda, El movimiento antichino en México (1871–1934): Problemas del racismo y del nacionalismo durante la Revolucion Mexicana (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, 1991), 73; Kenneth Cott, “Mexican Diplomacy and the Chinese Issue, 1876–1910,” Hispanic American Historical Review 67, no. 1 (1987): 63–85, esp. 69. 67. Raymond B. Craib III, “Chinese Immigrants in Porfirian Mexico: A Preliminary Study of Settlement, Economic Activity, and Anti-Chinese Sentiment” (master’s thesis, University of New Mexico, 1994), 8.



Notes to pages 52–55

193

68. Cott, “Mexican Diplomacy and the Chinese Issue,” 72. 69. Craib, “Chinese Immigrants in Porfirian Mexico,” 8. 70. Ibid., 8; Cott, “Mexican Diplomacy and the Chinese Issue,” 70. 71. Cott, “Mexican Diplomacy and the Chinese Issue,” 73–74. 72. Ralph, “Chinese Leak,” 525. 73. Craib, “Chinese Immigrants in Porfirian Mexico,” 8. 74. New York Times, December 4, 1891. 75. Lawrence Douglas Taylor Hansen, “El contrabando de chinos a lo largo de la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos, 1882–1931,” Frontera Norte 6 (January–June 1994): 41–57. 76. Senate Committee on Immigration, Report on Immigration of Chinese, 51st Cong., 1st sess., 1890, S. Ex. Doc. 97, pt. 5, 2. 77. Lovell H. Jerome to Secretary of the Treasury, July 16, 1886, Entry 134, Custom Case File 3359d, “Miscelleaneous Records Related to Chinese Immigration, 1877–1891,” Box 2, National Archives, Washington, D.C. 78. Cott, “Mexican Diplomacy and the Chinese Issue,” 74. 79. The reports are contained in Senate Committee on Immigration, Report on Immigration of Chinese. Testimony on these undercover operations also appears in House Select Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Chinese Immigration. 80. House Select Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Chinese Immigration, 545–547. 81. Ibid., 547. 82. San Diego Union, April 11, 1890, 2. 83. Ibid., 407, 547. 84. Ibid., 513. 85. Ibid., 581. 86. Unidentified press clipping, appended to correspondence. Anonymous to Secretary of the Treasury, May 8, 1890, Entry 134, Custom Case File 3359d, “Miscelleaneous Records Related to Chinese Immigration, 1877–1891,” Box 6, National Archives, Washington, D.C. 87. Ralph, Chinese Leak, 522. 88. Senate Committee on Immigration, Report on Immigration of Chinese, pt. 5, 1–2. 89. Ibid., pt. 7, 7. 90. House, Compilation from the Records of the Bureau of Immigration of Facts Concerning the Enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Laws, 59th Cong., 1st sess., 1906, H. Doc. 847, 13. For an 1891 account of Chinese in Baja California, see House Select Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Chinese Immigration, 545–546. 91. Ralph, “Chinese Leak,” 524; House Select Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Chinese Immigration, 518, 576, 561.



194

Notes to pages 55–61

92. See Taylor Hansen, “El contrabando de chinos a lo largo de la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos.” 93. San Diego Union, August 1, 1890, 8. 94. House Select Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Chinese Immigration, 409, 581. 95. Ibid., 548, 583. 96. Ibid., 581. Within a few years, Congressman Stump would have the opportunity to explore more fully the possibilities—and limits—of border enforcement. He was appointed in 1893 to serve as superintendent of immigration. 97. Senate Committee on Immigration, Report on Immigration of Chinese, pts. 1–7. 98. Ibid., pt. 5, 2. 99. Ibid., pt. 7, 2, 4. 100. For reports of this happening on the Canadian border at this time, see Senate Committee on Immigration, Report on Immigration of Chinese, pt. 6, 1, and House Select Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Chinese Immigration, 27. 101. For accounts of this, see House Select Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Chinese Immigration, 95–96, and Senate Committee on Immigration, Report on Immigration of Chinese, pt. 6, 2. 102. House, Chinese Laborers from Canada and Mexico, 51st Cong., 1st sess., H. Rep. 1925, 1–2. 103. See the report of Datus E. Coon in Senate Committee on Immigration, Report on Immigration of Chinese, pt. 7, 3. 104. House Select Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Chinese Immigration, 583. 105. Ibid., 928; Herbert Beecher to Secretary of the Treasury, July 7, 1887, Entry 134, Custom Case File 3359d, “Miscelleaneous Records Related to Chinese Immigration, 1877–1891,” Box 9, National Archives. 106. Datus E. Coon to John R. Berry, U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Immigration, Report on Immigration of Chinese, pt. 7, 6.

Chapter Three 1. Chae Chan Ping v. United States, 130 U.S. 581 (1889), cited in Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 23. 2. The title was changed to commissioner-general of immigration in 1895. Sharon D. Masanz, History of the Immigration and Naturalization Service: A Report Prepared at the Request of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Chairman, Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, for the Use of the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1980), 9.



Notes to pages 61–68

195

3. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860– 1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 68, 74. 4. Keith A. Fitzgerald, The Face of the Nation: Immigration, the State, and National Identity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 117–119. 5. Masanz, History of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 14–23; Roy L. Garis, Immigration Restriction: A Study of the Opposition to and Regulation of Immigration into the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 94–95; Kitty Calavita, U.S. Immigration Law and the Control of Labor: 1820–1924 (London: Academic Press, 1984), 70; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 100. 6. Garis, Immigration Restriction, 95; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 100. 7. Calavita, U.S. Immigration Law, 70. According to Calavita, granting greater discretion to immigration inspectors to determine an immigrant’s likeliness to become a public charge built a high degree of flexibility into the immigration restrictions, allowing the system to accommodate rises and falls in the labor market. 8. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 101. 9. Ibid., 96, 101; E. P. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 1798–1965 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 117. 10. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 102, 157. Support for the literacy test grew at mid-decade in part because the newly formed Immigration Restriction League devoted itself “single-mindedly” to promoting the test after 1894. At the same time, workers and their unions had begun searching debates over the merits of immigration restriction and the literacy test in particular in the mid-1890s. The American Federation of Labor endorsed literacy tests in 1897. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 103. 11. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 70–72, 101–105. As had opponents of the bill during the Senate debate, Cleveland also questioned the wisdom of a bill that would exclude unlettered but manual laborers while permitting the entry of literate individuals who might be radicals or anarchists. Edith Abbott, Immigration: Select Documents and Case Records (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1924), 198–200. 12. Garis, Immigration Restriction, 103–104; Maldwyn Allen Jones, American Immigration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 268; Marion T. Bennett, American Immigration Policies: A History (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1963), 24. For the best account of the ways in which medical scientists elaborated on the restrictions targeting the physically and mentally “defective” during this period, see Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the Immigrant Menace (New York: Basic Books, 1994). 13. Garis, Immigration Restriction, 101–111; Jones, American Immigration, 262; Hutchinson Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 462–465. On the head tax as a deterrent, see U.S. Department of the Treasury, Annual Report of the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury for the Year 1892 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1892), lxi.



196

Notes to pages 69–71

14. Masanz, History of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 14–23; Paul L. Winings, Development of Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Service History (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1966), 2; Darrell Hevenor Smith and H. Guy Herring, Bureau of Immigration: Its History, Activities, and Organization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1924), 19–28. 15. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 405–442. 16. For a good discussion of American immigration laws during this period as being more symbolic than substantial, see Calavita, U.S. Immigration Law, 66–72. Calavita argues that the political ambivalence about immigration reflected contradictions in the capitalist economy. American elites wanted a cheap labor supply but feared the social and political disorder that such a supply could entail. 17. In all likelihood they stopped touting the success of the restrictions because they were coming to suspect that immigrants refused passage to the United States had simply begun entering by way of Canada. 18. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Annual Report of the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, 1892, lv; U.S. Industrial Commission, Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration; including Testimony with Review and Digest (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), xciv. Between 1891 and 1900, the overall rejection rate for immigrants to the United States never exceeded 1.5 percent. Ibid., 662. 19. Calavita argues that a “literal interpretation of these two laws would have barred almost everyone.” Calavita, U.S. Immigration Law, 68–72, esp. 72n5. U.S. Industrial Commission, Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration, lviii. In fact, the standards could be applied strictly at times to block immigration that was, at certain times or in certain places, unwanted. For instance, when Japanese workers began immigrating in large numbers through the ports of Puget Sound after 1900, the treasury secretary was flooded with protests from local citizens. In response, immigration inspectors at those ports rigorously applied both the “likely to become a public charge” and contract labor provisions of the law. The Japanese consul complained that those immigrants averring “promise of employment” were routinely rejected as contract laborers while those explaining they had “no promise of employment” were deported as likely paupers. Senate Committee on Immigration, Regulation of Immigration of Aliens. Statements before the Committee on Immigration, United States Senate, on the Bill (H.R. 12199) to Regulate the Immigration of Aliens into the United States, 57th Cong., 1st sess., 1902, S. Rep. 2119, 452–453. 20. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Annual Report of the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, 1892, lix; Jones, American Immigration, 263. The assessment refers only to the restrictions aimed at non-Asian immigrants. 21. Fitzgerald, Face of the Nation, 124–125. 22. Masanz, History of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 9; U.S. Industrial Commission, Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration, 3; Michael C. LeMay, From Open Door to Dutch Door: An Analysis of U.S. Immigration Policy since 1820 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1987), 65.



Notes to pages 71–73

197

23. Calavita, U.S. Immigration Law, 67. 24. Masanz, History of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 11–12; Smith and Herring, Bureau of Immigration, 10, 22–23. 25. “Immigration Act of 1891,” in U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Immigration: Laws and Regulations, 1906 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906), 27, 29. To enhance administration of this prohibition, American medical inspectors began inspecting immigrants at the port of Naples in 1899, noting infirmities of potential passengers and informing shipping companies of those passengers likely to be refused admission. Smith and Herring, Bureau of Immigration, 10. 26. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Annual Report of the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, 1892, lx; idem, Annual Report of the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, 1895, xxxv–xxxvi. 27. “Immigration Act of 1903,” in U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Immigration: Laws and Regulations, 1906 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906), 34. 28. “Immigration Act of 1891,” in U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Immigration: Laws and Regulations, 1906 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906) 29. 29. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Annual Report of the CommissionerGeneral of Immigration, 1892, lxi. There was, however, at least one dedicated immigration inspector stationed at El Paso as early as 1893. El Paso Herald, June 5, 1893, 4. 30. U.S. Industrial Commission, Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration, 680. Ellis Island received not only the lion’s share of immigrants but also most of the money and attention from the Bureau of Immigration. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1902, 51. 31. U.S. Industrial Commission, Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration, lxii, 681. 32. For an example of the confident tone officials adopted, see the report by Robert Watchorn, “Immigration to the United States via Canada,” in U.S. Department of the Treasury, Bureau of Immigration, Report of the Immigrant Inspector in Charge of Canadian Border Inspection, 1902 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1902), 15. 33. Herman J. Schultes testimony, in U.S. Industrial Commission, Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration, 27–28. 34. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Annual Report of the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, 1891, lxii. 35. U.S. Industrial Commission, Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration, 681. 36. Ninette Kelley and Michael Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998).



198

Notes to pages 73–77

As late as 1902, Canada spent approximately $500,000 annually to induce immigration. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Bureau of Immigration, Report of the Immigrant Inspector in Charge of Canadian Border Inspection, 6. The U.S. Senate had already called for its northern and southern neighbors to adopt Chinese immigration policies in sync with those of the United States. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Chinese Laborers from Canada and Mexico, 51st Cong., 1st sess., 1889, H. Rep. 1925, 1–2; Kenneth Cott, “Mexican Diplomacy and the Chinese Issue, 1876–1910,” Hispanic American Historical Review 67, no. 1 (1987): 74. 37. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Annual Report of the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, 1891, lxii. 38. U.S. Industrial Commission, Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration, 17–18. 39. Ibid., 17–18. 40. Ibid., 682. 41. Ibid., lxi, 681. 42. Ibid., lxi, 681; Senate Committee on Immigration, Regulation of Immigration of Aliens, 408, 445–447. 43. Watchorn, “Immigration to the United States via Canada,” in U.S. Department of the Treasury, Bureau of Immigration, Report of the Immigrant Inspector in Charge of Canadian Border Inspection, 1902 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1902), 16–17; U.S. Industrial Commission, Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration, 684, 689–693. 44. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Annual Report of the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, 1898, lv–lvi; idem, Annual Report of the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, 1900, xlix. 45. Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 135–136, esp. 136n173. Canada may have taken these steps in part because the new border enforcement efforts of U.S. officials meant that more of those immigrants American officials deemed “undesireable” were now remaining in Canada. 46. Bureau of Immigration officials began to replace customs authorities after July 1, 1903. Smith and Herring, Bureau of Immigration, 23. 47. U.S. Department of the Treasury, U.S. Executive Branch Documents, 1789– 1909 (Congressional Information Service, 1990): “Execution of the Laws Pertaining to Immigration,” circular no. 83, June 2, 1892, microfiche; “Vigilance against Cholera,” circular no. 148, August 30, 1892, 1. Idem, Annual Report of the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, 1891, lx. 48. An annual appropriation paid for the enforcement of customs laws, out of which salaries of such inspectors could be drawn. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Annual Report of the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, 1894, xvii. 49. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Annual Report of the CommissionerGeneral of Immigration, 1899, 32; idem, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1900, 42.



Notes to pages 77–81

199

50. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Executive Branch Documents, 1789– 1909, Circular no. 140, September 3, 1897, 1. 51. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Executive Branch Documents, 1789– 1909, Circular no. 88, June 14, 1900, 1. 52. A 1901 congressional investigation of immigration law and practices had chronicled extensive smuggling and undocumented entry on the Canadian border and called for an enhanced system of border inspection on that line. U.S. Industrial Commission, Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration, xviii, 38. 53. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Bureau of Immigration, Report of the Immigrant Inspector in Charge of Canadian Border Inspection, 1902, 3. 54. Ibid., 4. Watchorn urged that the two “unfilled stations should be supplied with a competent inspector each at the very earliest convenience of the Bureau.” Ibid., 9. 55. Ibid., 4, 6. 56. Ibid., 3, 7, 9. 57. Ibid., 7. 58. Ibid., 5. 59. Ibid., 7. 60. Ibid., 7. 61. Senate Committee on Immigration, Regulation of Immigration of Aliens, 449, 443. 62. U.S. Industrial Commission, Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration, 712. House, Compilation from the Records of the Bureau of Immigration of Facts Concerning the Enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Laws, 59th Cong, 1st sess., 1906, H. Doc. 847, 12. On the 1903 agreement with the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, see ibid., 95; and U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration to the Secretary of Labor, 1903 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1903), 100. Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 142. 63. U.S. Senate, History of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 13; U.S. Industrial Commission, Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration, xviii, 38. 64. “Report of Conditions Existing in Europe and Mexico affecting Emigration and Immigration,” casefile 51411/1, in U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Series A, Subject Correspondence Files, pt. 2, Mexican Immigration, 1906–1930 (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1993), microfilm, reel 1 of 17 hereafter cited as INS, Records). This collection, on which I draw heavily, is composed of files from Record Group 85 of the National Archives. 65. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 130–132; Senate Committee on Immigration, Regulation of Immigration of Aliens, 71. 66. Garis, Immigration Restriction, 104; “Immigration Act of 1903,” in U.S.



200

Notes to pages 81–85

Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Immigration: Laws and Regulations, 1906, 34. 67. The act marked an important step in what Keith Fitzgerald has called the transition from “symbolic federal efforts to effective national policy” in matters of immigration during this period. Fitzgerald, The Face of the Nation, 129. 68. U.S. Industrial Commission, Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration, lxii. 69. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Annual Report of the CommissionerGeneral of Immigration, 1902, 54. 70. Senate Committee on Immigration, Regulation of Immigration of Aliens, 31–95, esp. 71, 76. 71. Ibid., 443, 449. 72. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Bureau of Immigration, Report of the Immigrant Inspector in Charge of Canadian Border Inspection, 7, 9; Senate Committee on Immigration, Regulation of Immigration of Aliens, 443, 449. 73. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Bureau of Immigration, Report of the Immigrant Inspector in Charge of Canadian Border Inspection, 9. 74. The sense of urgency was palpable. For instance, in the course of his testimony, Commissioner-General Sargent spoke of the need to assign officers west of the Ontario-Michigan border within “the next few days.” Senate Committee on Immigration, Regulation of Immigration of Aliens, 459. 75. Congressional Record, 57th Cong., 1st sess., December 8, 1902, 100–101. 76. Senate Committee on Immigration, Regulation of Immigration of Aliens, 61. 77. Ibid., 443, 462–463. 78. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 133. 79. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1906, 26;idem, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1907, 11. 80. Senate Committee on Immigration, Regulation of Immigration of Aliens, 461; U.S. Department of the Treasury, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General on Immigration, 1896, 17. According to Calavita, the bureau had never employed more than two full-time contract labor inspectors. Calavita, U.S. Immigration Law, 44. 81. Senate Committee on Immigration, Regulation of Immigration of Aliens, 462. 82. See Commissioner-General of Immigration, Annual Reports of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1900–1903. 83. Masanz, History of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 14. The mounted guard appears to have evolved out of the Customs Service’s “mounted inspectors,” which dated back to 1853. See Jim Brown, Riding the Line: The United States Customs Service in San Diego, 1885–1930: A Documentary History (Washington, DC: Department of the Treasury, 1991), 51.



Notes to pages 85–91

201

84. House, Compilation from the Records of the Bureau of Immigration of Facts Concerning the Enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Laws, 13. 85. Charles Nagel to Elihu Root, February 12, 1908, 2, casefile 51463/B, in INS, Records, reel 1. 86. Thompson to Secretary of State, April 30, 1908, 1, casefile 51463/B, in INS, Records, reel 1. 87. “The procedure followed, including the work of physicians and of the Boards of Inquiry in doubtful cases, is substantially the same as that followed at sea ports.” Jeremiah Whipple Jenks and W. Jeff Lauck, The Immigration Problem: A Study of American Immigration Conditions and Needs (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1913), 354–355.

Chapter Four 1. Sharon D. Masanz, History of the Immigration and Naturalization Service: A Report Prepared at the Request of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Chairman, Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, for the Use of the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1980), 17–24. 2. Marcus Braun to Frank P. Sargent, February 12, 1907, 34, casefile 52320/1, in U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Series A, Subject Correspondence Files, pt. 2, Mexican Immigration, 1906–1930 (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1993), microfilm, reel 2 of 17 (these records are hereafter cited as INS, Records). Braun did not cite a specific figure but estimated that for every immigrant who attempted to enter the country legally at an American port of entry on the Mexican line in 1907, another nine tried surreptitious entry. In 1907, 5,214 non-Mexican alien immigrants were admitted at Mexican border ports. By Braun’s estimate, then, almost 50,000 aliens may have attempted illicit entry during that same period. 3. Ibid., 11. 4. Charles Nagel to Elihu Root, February 12, 1908, 2, casefile 51463/B, in INS, Records, reel 1. 5. Prior to the 1903 application of the head tax to immigrants crossing U.S. land borders, border officials kept no statistics on immigrant admissions. The 1905 regulation put the 1903 law into effect. See “Collection of Head Tax on Account of Aliens Crossing the Mexican Border,” bureau circular no. 13, February 28, 1905, in U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Immigration: Laws and Regulations, 1906 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906), x (microfiche). By statute, natives of the neighboring republic were exempt from paying the head tax. 6. U.S. Department of the Treasury, U.S. Bureau of Immigration, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1901 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), 8.



202

Notes to pages 91–97

7. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1908 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1908), 128. 8. Nagel to Root, February 12, 1908, 3. 9. Braun to Sargent, February 12, 1907, 7. 10. Ibid., 37. Unlike maritime ports, from which excluded immigrants would be automatically deported by ship all the way back to the port from which they sailed, the land borders afforded hopeful immigrants opportunities for multiple efforts at illegal entry. 11. Nagel to Root, February 12, 1908, 4. 12. Braun to Sargent, February 12, 1907, 34. 13. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1907, 140. 14. Lawrence Douglas Taylor Hansen, “El contrabando de chinos a lo largo de la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos, 1882–1931,” Frontera Norte 6 (January–June 1994): 44, 46. 15. U.S. Industrial Commission, Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration; including Testimony with Review and Digest (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), 712. House, Compilation from the Records of the Bureau of Immigration of Facts Concerning the Enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Laws, 59th Cong., 1st sess., 1906, H. Doc. 847, 12. On the 1903 agreement with the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, see idem, 95, and U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1903 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1903), 100. In 1903 the Canadian head tax on Chinese workers was raised to $500. Ninette Kelley and Michael Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 142. 16. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1903, 101; House, Compilation, 13. 17. Kenneth Cott, “Mexican Diplomacy and the Chinese Issue, 1876–1910,” Hispanic American Historical Review 67, no. 1 (1987): 68–70; José Jorge Gomez Izquierda, El movimiento antichino en México (1871–1934): Problemas del racismo y del nacionalismo durante la Revolucion Mexicana (Mexico City: Instituto de Antropologia e Historia, 1991), 73. 18. The 1888 amendments to the Chinese exclusion law had given the secretary of the treasury the authority to designate specific ports of entry for the admission of Chinese to the United States. In 1902, immigration rules specified three sites for Chinese entry on the Mexican border: Eagle Pass, El Paso, and Nogales. By 1909, no Mexican ports were included on the list of ports of entry. Senate, A Compilation of the Laws, Treaty, and Regulations and Rulings of the Treasury Department Relating to the Exclusion of Chinese, 57th Cong., 1st sess., 1903, S. Doc.



Notes to pages 97–99

203

291, 41; U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Treaty, Laws, and Regulations Governing the Admission of Chinese (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909). 19. Cott, “Mexican Diplomacy and the Chinese Issue,” 72. 20. Braun to Sargent, February 12, 1907, 9. 21. Ibid., 35, 9–10. 22. Ibid., 31. 23. Nagel to Root, February 12, 1908, 6; House, Compilation, 14. 24. Responsibility for administering the Chinese Exclusion Acts had been transferred from the Department of the Treasury to the Department of Commerce and Labor in 1900. House, Compilation, 7; El Paso Herald-Post, January 11, 1904, 4. 25. Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 40–48; Jean Pajus, The Real Japanese California (San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1971), 5; Stephan Thernstrom, ed., Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1980), s.v. “Japanese,” 563. The migration figures do not account for the fact that some individuals may have entered the country more than once, nor do they account for undocumented migration. 26. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 46. 27. Tsurutani Hisashi, America-Bound: The Japanese and the Opening of the American West, trans. Betsey Scheiner (Tokyo: Japan Times, 1989), 90–93. On rates and causes of Japanese debarments during this period, see U.S. Department of the Treasury, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1894–1902, and U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1903–1911. 28. In 1900, for instance, Japanese immigrants accounted for almost a third of all immigrants rejected as contract laborers. See U.S. Department of the Treasury, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1900; U.S. Industrial Commission, Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration, 755–756. The contracts that migrants and emigration companies entered into actually carefully avoided violating the American prohibition on contract labor. See the sample contract at 754. 29. Hishani, America-Bound, 96. 30. “Excerpt from ‘Report of Conditions Existing in Europe and Mexico affecting Emigration and Immigration’ Pertaining to Using Mexico as a Conduit to Enter the United States,” casefile 51411/1, in INS, Records, reel 1. Braun to Sargent, June 10, 1907, 4, casefile 52320/A, in INS, Records, reel 1. 31. Braun to Sargent, June 10, 1907, 4. 32. Ibid., 6–9; El Paso Herald, March 22, 1907, 1. 33. New York Times, October 11, 1907, 4. 34. Louise Seymour Houghton, “Syrians in the United States: Part 1, Sources



204

Notes to pages 100–104

and Settlement,” Survey, July 1, 1911, 481–495; Alixa Naff, Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 76–117; Braun to Sargent, February 12, 1907, 13. 35. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1903; Braun to Sargent, February 12, 1907, 13. 36. Braun to Sargent, February 12, 1907, 11–12. 37. U.S. Industrial Commission, Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration, xvi, lxii. 38. “A Report of Conditions on Mexican Border, 1906–7,” January 8, 1907, 3, casefile 51423/1, in INS, Records, reel 1. Braun to Sargent, February 12, 1907, 7. Ticket agents reportedly received higher commissions on tickets sold to Mexican ports. On ethnic networks in Lebanese migration and the undocumented migration of Lebanese through Mexico and Canada, see Naff, Becoming American, 92–93. See also Alixa Naff, “The Early Arab Immigrant Experience,” in The Development of Arab-American Identity, ed. Ernest McCarus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 23–36, esp. 27. 39. “A Report of Conditions on Mexican Border, 1906–7,” 3; Braun to Sargent, February 12, 1907, 7. 40. Chain migration patterns are suggested by the fact that a group of five hotels in Mexico City specialized in handling Lebanese immigrants from one principal town and vicinity in Syria. “A Report of Conditions on Mexican Border, 1906–7,” 4. 41. Braun to Sargent, February 12, 1907, 12. 42. See sections on “Diseased Immigrants” in U.S. Department of the Treasury, Annual Reports of the Commissioner-General of Immigration to the Secretary of the Treasury, 1898–1903. The sudden increase in rejections on medical grounds may be partly attributable to a new focus, beginning in 1897, on favus, a contagious fungal condition afflicting the scalp. It was deemed a deportable condition in 1897. On this and the general improvements in medical inspections, see especially U.S. Department of the Treasury, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration to the Secretary of the Treasury, 1898, 30. According to a 1901 congressional report, Italians were especially subject to the infectious eye disease of trachoma as well as favus and therefore were apt to attempt evasion of the medical inspection mandated by immigration laws. U.S. Industrial Commission, Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration, vxi. 43. “Excerpt from ‘Report of Conditions Existing in Europe and Mexico affecting Emigration and Immigration’ Pertaining to Using Mexico as a Conduit to Enter the United States,” frame 8, casefile 51411/1, in INS, Records, reel 1. Germans and Spaniards were the most numerous European migrants to Mexico, but they generally settled in Mexico. 44. El Paso Herald Post, February 5, 1892, 2. 45. Braun to Sargent, February 12, 1907, 12.



Notes to pages 104–105

205

46. “Excerpt from ‘Report of Conditions Existing in Europe and Mexico affecting Emigration and Immigration’ Pertaining to Using Mexico as a Conduit to Enter the United States,” frame 17. 47. Braun to Sargent, February 12, 1907, 14–15. 48. Clifford Alan Perkins, Border Patrol: With the U. S. Immigration Service on the Mexican Boundary, 1910–54 (El Paso, 1978), 10–12. 49. Nagel to Root, February 12, 1908, 5. 50. Braun to Sargent, February 12, 1907, 36. They did so, no doubt, for a consideration from the particular smuggling enterprise to whom they referred migrants. 51. “A Report of Conditions on Mexican Border, 1906–7,” 3. Similar establishments flourished in Mexico City, which, as a rail center linking the coasts to the border, was a stopover point for Lebanese, Chinese, and Japanese migrants. In fact, it was often on the basis of advice received in Mexico City that migrants contacted smugglers in border cities. For an example, see ibid., 4. 52. Ibid., 6. 53. See, for instance, ibid., 15; El Paso Herald, August 28, 1899, 5; March 17, 1894, 1; and April 10, 1909, 3. 54. El Paso Herald, August 11, 1904, 5. Chinese adapted their appearance in response to the coaching they received from the smugglers assisting them across the border. For a description of the widespread smuggling activities of the San Francisco-based Chinese Six Companies, see Hansen, “El contrabando de chinos.” 55. “A Report of Conditions on Mexican Border, 1906–7,” 21–23. 56. Ibid., 12–13, 15. For other examples of passing, see Lee, At America’s Gates, 161–164. 57. See, for instance, the description of activities at the border port of entry linking Douglas, Arizona, with Agua Prieta, Sonora, in Perkins, Border Patrol, 24. 58. George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 50–51; “A Report of Conditions on Mexican Border, 1906–7,” 12. As noted in the subsequent chapter, Immigration Service employees had begun screening Mexican immigrants after 1900 as well. But their vigilance in doing so seems to have been related to the manner in which immigrant Mexicans typically arrived at the border, via trains. So the fact that immigration officers continued to be observed “ignoring” Mexican border crossers in the mid-1900s relates to the fact that these individuals were deemed “locals.” 59. “A Report of Conditions on Mexican Border, 1906–7,” 12. 60. Ibid., 8, 12. 61. Ibid., 5–6. 62. Senate Committee on Immigration, Regulation of Immigration of Aliens. Statements before the Committee on Immigration, United States Senate, on the Bill



206

Notes to pages 106–1 12

(H.R. 12199) to Regulate the Immigration of Aliens into the United States, 57th Cong., 1st sess., 1902, S. Rep. 2119, 31–95. This example comes from a Syrian smuggling operation exposed on the Canadian border in 1902, but there is every reason to suspect the same dodge was employed along the U.S.-Mexico line as well. 63. “A Report of Conditions on Mexican Border, 1906–7,” 3. Sources are incomplete in providing information about the family links of the Lebanese and European immigrants attempting to cross the border during this period. Many appear to have been engaging in typical chain migration patterns, bound for American cities where their kin awaited. Perhaps some had been the lone family member rejected at an American seaport or prevented from steaming out of a European port. Now, routed through Mexico, they sought reunion with their families, and they could assure immigration inspectors that they had a precise destination and family to meet. 64. Braun to Sargent, June 10, 1907, 10; Charles L. Babcock to Frank P. Sargent, Commissioner-General of Immigration, January 10, 1908, 10–11, casefile 51748/IIA, in INS, Records, reel 1. 65. “A Report of Conditions on Mexican Border, 1906–7,” 5. 66. Darrell Hevenor Smith and H. Guy Herring, The Bureau of Immigration: Its History, Activities, and Organization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1924), 7–8. For an example of the contractual arrangements with local physicians on the Mexican border, see Fred E. Lawton to Commissioner-General of Immigration, May 13, 1907, casefile 51564, in INS, Records, reel 1. 67. Memorandum, “In Re. Inspector Seraphic as to Mexican border,” February 2, 1907, 4, casefile 51423/1A, in INS, Records, reel 1; U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Immigration Laws and Regulations, 1906, 39. 68. El Paso Evening News, March 14, 1908, 1. 69. Braun to Sargent, June 10, 1907, 8; Babcock to Sargent, January 10, 1908, 14. 70. Babcock to Sargent, January 10, 1908, 9. 71. For daily accounts of the progress of this investigation, see Taylor to Sargent, March 5–12, 15, 1908, casefile 52588/1B, in INS, Records, reel 3. 72. On corruption at Ellis Island, see U.S. Department of the Treasury, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1902, 56. Perkins, Border Patrol, 50–53. 73. Taylor to Sargent, March 8, 1908. 74. Babcock to Sargent, January 10, 1908, 13. 75. Making use of corruptible American officials clearly represented an important tactic for smugglers throughout the period of this study. See Lee, At America’s Gates, 198–200. For a close analysis of an early case on the Canadian border, see Sarah M. Griffith, “Border Crossings: Race, Class, and Smuggling in Pacific Coast Chinese Immigrant Society,” Western Historical Quarterly 35 (Winter 2004): 473–492. For contemporary accounts of corruption scandals involving im-



Notes to pages 1 12–1 16

207

migration officers at Nogales in 1901 and San Diego in 1908, see New York Times, August 25, 1901, 8, and Los Angeles Times, October 2, 1908, 11. 76. San Francisco port authorities, flooded with Japanese immigrants in the late 1890s, expressed misgivings about the trustworthiness of the Japanese translators on whom they relied. See Bureau of Immigration, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1908, 29. 77. Memorandum, “In Re. Inspector Seraphic as to Mexican border,” February 2, 1907, 1. 78. Ibid., 2. 79. Ibid. In fact, Mattar may simply have been extorting money from migrants through Khoury’s boardinghouse. According to the statement of the inspecting physician at El Paso, Lebanese migrants were told that a payment to Mattar of anywhere from $5 to $50 would ensure their entry into the United States. In fact, he probably did nothing to help any of them. Those that passed inspection did so on their own merits; those who were rejected were given a refund because “there was a mistake made.” “Statement of Dr. E. D. Sinks, P.H. & M.S. Surgeon at El Paso, Texas, concerning the extortion of money from immigrants,” December 31, 1906, 1, casefile 51423/1, in INS, Records, reel 1. 80. Taylor to Sargent, March 9, 1908, 2. 81. Babcock to Sargent, January 10, 1908, pp. 6–7. By 1908 Hasekawa had established himself nicely in one of the two Ciudad Juarez “Japanese Bureaus” that specialized in smuggling Japanese across the river. Hasekawa was, no doubt, greatly aided by the knowledge he had acquired about the work of immigration inspectors. 82. El Paso Evening News, March 14, 1908, 1; Babcock to Sargent, January 10, 1908, 12–13.1. 83. For daily accounts of the progress of both investigations, see Taylor to Sargent, March 5–12, 15, 1908. 84. Charles L. Babcock to Frank P. Sargent, Commissioner-General of Immigration, January 11, 1908, 5, casefile 51748/IIA, in INS, Records, reel 1. 85. “Report of Conditions on Mexican Border, 1906–7,” 6. 86. Richard H. Taylor to Frank P. Sargent, March 3, 1908, casefile 52588/1B, in INS, Records, reel 3. 87. Perkins, Border Patrol, 21–23. 88. U.S. Industrial Commission, Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration, 758, 799. 89. Ibid., 758, 799; Don. M. Stewart, Frontier Port: A Chapter in San Diego’s History (Los Angeles: W. Ritchie Press, 1966), 144; Eliot Grinnell Mears, Resident Orientals on the American Pacific Coast: Their Legal and Economic Status (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), 234. See also House, Compilation, 11. 90. Babcock to Sargent, January 11, 1908, 7. 91. Braun to Sargent, 15. 92. Babcock to Sargent, January 10, 1908, Exhibit One, “Directions By Foot



208

Notes to pages 1 16–120

How to Get to Tucson from Juarez, Mexico,” trans. Wong Aloy, January 5, 1908, casefile 51748/IIA, in INS, Records, reel 1; Babcock to Sargent, January 10, 1908, Exhibit One, “Direction For East Route By Foot,” trans. Wong Aloy, January 5, 1908, casefile 51748/IIA, in INS, Records, reel 1. 93. William Bowers to Commissioner-General of Immigration, June 19, 1901, Records of the United States Customs Service, Record Group 36, San Diego Collection District, Outgoing General Correspondence, box 3, National Archives and Records Administration, Pacific Region (Laguna Niguel); Bowers to Commissioner-General of Immigration, April 5, 1902, ibid. 94. Jim Brown, Riding the Line: The United States Customs Service in San Diego, 1885–1930: A Documentary History (Washington, DC 1991), 57–58. See also Perkins, Border Patrol, 9, 16.

Chapter Five 1. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1908 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1908), 208. 2. David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 43–46; George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 18–19; Mark Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow: Mexican Immigrant Labor in the United States, 1900–1940 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1976), 3–23. 3. Camille Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900–1939 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 28, 34. 4. The best overviews of these processes can be found in Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 43–46; Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 18–19; and Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 3–23. 5. Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 5; Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 30–39. 6. Arthur F. Corwin, “Early Mexican Labor Migration,” in Immigrants— and Immigrants: Perspectives on Mexican Labor Migration to the United States, ed. Arthur F. Corwin (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1978), 30. 7. Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 8. 8. Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 8; Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American; Arthur F. Corwin and Lawrence Cardoso, “Vamos al Norte,” in Immigrants— and Immigrants: Perspectives on Mexican Labor Migration to the United States, ed. Arthur F. Corwin (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1978), 51. 9. Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow; U.S. Department of Commerce



Notes to pages 120–126

209

and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1911 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911), 314. 10. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 43–46; Samuel Bryan, “Mexican Immigrants in the United States,” Survey 28 (September 7, 1912): 726–727. 11. El Paso Herald, August 6, 1901, 1; Statement of Hon. Frank P. Sargent, Commissioner-General of Immigration, in Senate Committee on Immigration, Regulation of Immigration of Aliens. Statements before the Committee on Immigration, United States Senate, on the Bill (H.R. 12199) to Regulate the Immigration of Aliens into the United States, 57th Cong., 1st sess., 1902, S. Rep. 2119, 460. 12. El Paso became linked to the Mexican interior in 1884; Nogales, Arizona, and Laredo, Texas, in 1888; and Eagle Pass in 1892. On railroad links to the border, see Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 45, and Cardoso, “Vamos al Norte,” 48. Bryan, “Mexican Immigrants in the United States,” 728; Victor S. Clark, “Mexican Labor in the United States,” Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor 78 (September 1908): 466. 13. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1911 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911), 314. Although not an accurate measure of circular labor migration, the Mexican-born population of the United States doubled between 1900 and 1910, from 103,000 to 220,000. Walter T. K. Nugent, Into the West: The Story of Its People (New York: Knopf, 1999), 199. 14. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 41. 15. El Paso Herald, June 5, 1893, 4; March 20, 1893, 1. 16. Sargent statement, in Senate Committee on Immigration, Regulation of Immigration of Aliens, 460. But in the broader context of Immigration Bureau priorities and activities on the border in the 1900s, this alarm rings a bit false. Arguing as he was for a very substantial expansion of his bureau’s budget and resources, Sargent no doubt sought to portray the “disorder” of the Mexican border in the worst possible light. 17. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1909 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1910), 239. 18. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 51. 19. Sánchez rightly notes the importance of the strong border culture, although he assumes it had a more lasting influence. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 51. Under section 8 of the Immigration Act of March 3, 1891, the secretary of the treasury was empowered to proscribe rules for border crossings between the United States and its contiguous neighbors, provided that the rules did not “obstruct or unnecessarily delay, impede, or annoy passengers in ordinary travel between said countries.” Act quoted in U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Immigration Laws and Regulations, 1906 (Washington, DC: Government



210

Notes to pages 126–127

Printing Office, 1906), 29. As discussed in the previous chapter, the success smugglers had in passing Chinese and Syrian immigrants as “local Mexicans” as late as 1906 testifies to how efforts to accommodate local traffic could lead to lighter enforcement. 20. As in fact, many of them probably were. El Paso Herald, January 28, 1895, 4. 21. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1905 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1905), 606. 22. For instance, Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 55–60; Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 11–12. 23. On the expansion of Immigration Bureau forces on the border to deal with Mexican immigration, see Sargent statement, in Senate Committee on Immigration, Regulation of Immigration of Aliens, 462. 24. Although there are no statistics on the debarment of Mexican nationals as early as 1902, the commissioner-general reported that summer that border officials inspected Mexican workers in an effort to detect preexisting labor contracts. Sargent statement, in Senate Committee on Immigration, Regulation of Immigration of Aliens, 460. Some oral historical sources suggest that immigrants were crossing the border with little formal inspection as late as 1907. It may be that some of those individuals were not inspected because of higher class standing. Officials frequently treated those they deemed “respectable” (middle- or upper-class) Mexican citizens differently than the impoverished “peon” Mexicans. See Mauricio Cordero interview by Oscar Martinez, February 15, 1974, transcript no. 142, 12–13, Institute of Oral History, University of Texas at El Paso, and, in the same collection, Cleofas Calleros interview by Oscar Martinez, September 14, 1972, transcript no. 157, 9. It is also likely that these testimonies reflect the treatment that local Mexicans received at the border. 25. It appears likely that the reported figures on debarred aliens from 1900 to 1905 may have included both Mexican and non-Mexican aliens, immigrants and nonimmigrants. This is suggested by the fact that, when Mexicans began to be reported separately after 1906, the reported number of “aliens debarred from foreign contiguous territory” dropped by several thousand from the reported numbers for previous years. The significance of this is that it suggests authorities debarred significant numbers of Mexicans even earlier than reported, perhaps as early as 1900. See U.S. Department of the Treasury, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1900–1902, and U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1903–1906. 26. The data presented in the annual reports and the practice of enumeration on the border shifted over this brief period of time. In 1906 and 1907, officials



Notes to pages 127–129

211

reported only a tiny number of Mexicans debarred as alien immigrants, apparently reporting all Mexican exclusions together (under Mexico) under the category of “Citizens of Foreign Contiguous Territory Refused Admission.” In 1908, the number of Mexicans in that category dropped significantly, from 1,347 to just 540, but at the same time the number of Mexicans reported rejected as immigrant aliens climbed from 13 in 1906 to 513 in 1907. The increase suggests that officials were no longer conflating the immigrant and nonimmigrant Mexicans as in years past. Accordingly, I have combined these figures to reach a total of 1,053 for 1908. In 1909 and 1910, officials reported in the rejections of “Citizens of Foreign Contiguous Territory” only those who had applied for temporary (six-month) admission. The balance of Mexicans, those rejected as immigrants, were reported as rejected immigrants. Again, I have added these numbers together to arrive at an estimate of the total numbers of Mexican citizens, immigrant and nonimmigrant, being debarred at Mexican ports of entry. 27. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1907, 89 (Table IIIC). 28. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1908, 117. 29. The steep decline in the number of Mexicans rejected from 1906 through 1908 is intriguing, but for some of the same reasons, it is difficult to assess the numerical decline in rejections from 1906 through 1908. Was there in fact some unofficial loosening of restrictions on Mexicans at this time? Perhaps a rise in the cross-border traffic of non-Mexican aliens consumed the energies of immigration officials. A wave of Japanese immigrants flooded El Paso in 1906 and 1907, and debarments of non-Mexicans on the border rose from 368 in 1906 to 1,300 in 1907 and 1,204 in 1908. On the upsurge in Japanese immigration, see El Paso Herald, December 27, 1906, 1. 30. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1906, 462, 493. 31. Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 12. 32. Bryan, “Mexican Immigrants in the United States,” 727. 33. Clark, “Mexican Labor in the United States,” 473. El Paso Herald, February 4, 1907, 2; February 9, 1907, 2; February 20, 1907, 4; November 15, 1907, 10; November 18, 1907, 4; August 31, 1909, 12. The newspaper accounts from El Paso suggest further reason to be skeptical of the official figures on Mexicans debarred at the border. According to the 1907 Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, only 1,347 Mexicans had been debarred at the El Paso port of entry from July 1906 to June 1907. Yet the newspaper accounts from February 1907 suggest the total number would



212

Notes to pages 129–131

have been considerably higher. Perhaps officials unofficially “closed” the border at times to Mexican labor migrants. Under those circumstances, officials would be spared the work and charade of inspecting and formally debarring each migrant as a potential pauper. 34. Clark, “Mexican Labor in the United States,” 472–473. 35. F. W. Berkshire to Commissioner-General of Immigration, November 1, 1909, 9, casefile 52546/31, in Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Series A, Subject Correspondence Files, pt. 2: Mexican Immigration, 1906–1930 (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1993), microfilm, reel 2 of 17 (hereafter cited as INS, Records). 36. On the estimate of undocumented immigration in the 1900s, see Louis Bloch, “Facts about Mexican Immigration before and since the Quota Restriction Laws,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 24 (March 1929): 51. Because they have underestimated the degree to which American officials actually enforced immigration restrictions on Mexican migrants in the 1900s and 1910s, historians of Mexican immigration have suggested that the undocumented immigration of Mexicans began in earnest after the 1917 imposition of the literacy test and head tax. No doubt the 1917 act did lead to widespread undocumented entry of Mexicans, but the practice had begun decades earlier. 37. Charles L. Babcock to F. P. Sargent, Commissioner-General of Immigration, January 10, 1908, 5–6, casefile 51748/IIA, in INS, Records, reel 1. 38. Berkshire to Commissioner-General, November 1, 1909, 3. 39. The most direct evidence of this lies in a June 1907 report Immigrant Inspector Marcus Braun made to the commissioner-general. Instructed in February 1907 to investigate contract labor migration on the Mexican border, Braun devoted his entire June report to patterns of Japanese and Chinese “contract labor” migration, neglecting the Mexican phenomenon almost entirely. Marcus Braun to Frank P. Sargent, June 10, 1907, 4, casefile 52320/A, in INS, Records, reel 2. 40. Thomas D. Edwards to Robert Bacon, November 25, 1905, Despatches from U.S. Consul in Ciudad Juarez ( Paso del Norte), 1850–1906, M184, reel 6. On American recruitment efforts, see Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 3–23, and GuerinGonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams, 29–31. 41. F. W. Berkshire to Commissioner-General of Immigration, February 16, 1910, 2, casefile 54546/31, in INS, Records, reel 2; Luther C. Steward, Acting Supervising Inspector, to Commissioner-General, October 5, 1909, 2, casefile 51864/79, in INS, Records, reel 2; Berkshire to Commissioner-General, November 1, 1909, 2; Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams, 32–33; Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 53–55. As George Sánchez notes, the controversy over recruitment as a violation of the contract labor law probably had much to do with fierce competition between competing labor agencies in El Paso. Sánchez argues persuasively that bureau efforts to curtail recruiting in Mexico arose from complaints of the principals of



Notes to pages 131–133

213

Anglo labor agencies. Supervising Inspector Berkshire in fact proposed plans that would have erased the advantages enjoyed by the labor agencies run by Spanishsurnamed individuals. See Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 53–55. 42. In reality, then, stricter enforcement of the contract labor prohibition after 1909 did not so much force change on Mexican migration patterns as it forced change on the merchants of labor working out of El Paso, who were forced to modify their recruitment practices in Mexico. The Mexican Revolution further discouraged agencies from recruiting in Mexico. Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams, 35–36. 43. El Paso Herald, July 21, 1910, 9. 44. Charles Nagel to Elihu Root, February 12, 1908, 6, casefile 51463/B, in INS, Records, reel 1. 45. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1909, 239. 46. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1910, 298. Mexican immigrants emerged as a “problem” in part because they had begun fanning out beyond the southwestern United States and into northern industrial areas. Part of the justifications for adopting a more relaxed approach to their entry along the border had been a belief that they were especially suited for labor in the intense heat of the southwestern deserts. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1911, 275. 47. Reels 3, 4, 5, and 6 of the INS Records collection contain extensive records on the activities of local immigration officers during the Mexican Revolution. For another account of how the revolution affected immigration officers’ duties and daily routines, see Clifford Alan Perkins, Border Patrol: With the U.S. Immigration Service on the Mexican Boundary, 1910–54 (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1978), 32–43. 48. For instance, between February and May 1911, El Paso had no railroad ties with the interior of Mexico. U.S. Department of Labor and Commerce, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1911, 316. Just as developments within Canada had greatly retarded the smuggling of Asian and European migrants across the Canadian border in the early 1900s, so too developments within Mexico in the 1910s did much to curtail smuggling in the 1910s. In both cases, the success of American officials in combating smuggling rested to a large degree on external developments. 49. Clifford Alan Perkins, Border Patrol, 49. The Commissioner-General of Immigration reported giddily in 1916 that, for the first time since the district inception, it could report that it had Chinese smuggling “well in hand.” See U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1916, (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916), 228. To a small extent, however, anti-Chinese violence also stimulated some Chi-



214

Notes to pages 134–136

nese immigration to the United States. Many ethnic Chinese long resident in Mexico sought to escape persecution in Mexico by entering the United States. Some Chinese entered the United States carefully in the hopes of eluding capture and assuming residence in the United States. Others, however, fully intended to allow themselves to be caught by immigration authorities and deported to China. It was a well-understood fact that many Chinese aliens, ever since the United States first began deporting smuggled Chinese back to China (rather than Mexico or Canada), had allowed themselves to be arrested purposefully to avail themselves of this free passage to China. Perkins, Border Patrol, 26. See also James R. Thomas, “Los chinos en Arizona y el norte de México, 1888–1937,” in Sonora: Textos de su historia (Mexico City, 1989), 31–40; and Lawrence Douglas Taylor Hansen, “El contrabando de chinos a lo largo de la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos, 1882–1931,” Frontera Norte 6 ( January–June 1994). 50. Michael Dennis Carman, United States Customs and the Madero Revolution (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1976), 30–31; Linda B. Hall and Don M. Coerver, Revolution on the Border: The United States and Mexico, 1910–1920 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 21, 23, 50–54. 51. This included helping custom officials enforce the partial arms embargo in place from March 1912 to February 1914. Hall and Coerver, Revolution on the Border, 60, 70–74. 52. U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration to the Secretary of Labor, 1914, (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1914), 458. 53. Telegram from Harris, Acting Supervising Inspector, El Paso, to Funston, Major-General Commanding, September 12, 1915, casefile 53108/71N, in INS, Records, reel 5; F. W. Berkshire to Inspector-in-Charge, Los Angeles, December 24, 1918, casefile 51941/10, in INS, Records, reel 1. 54. F. W. Berkshire to Commissioner-General of Immigration, October 4, 1915, 5, casefile 53108/71O, in INS, Records, reel 5. 55. Fred E. Lawton to Commissioner-General of Immigration, May 17, 1907, 2, casefile 51941/7, in INS, Records, reel 1. 56. Ibid. 57. Fred E. Lawton to Commissioner-General of Immigration, May 11, 1907, “Exhibit B,” casefile 51941/7, in INS, Records, reel 1. 58. F. P. Sargent to Fred E. Lawton, May 22, 1907, casefile 51941/7, in INS, Records, reel 1. 59. E.P. Reynolds to Supervising Inspector, El Paso, September 15, 1915, 1, casefile 53108/71N, in INS, Records, reel 5; Lawton to Commissioner-General, May 17, 1907. 60. Manuel G. Gonzales, Mexicanos: A History of Mexicans in the United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 111; Hall and Coerver, Revolution on the Border, 23–24, 110. The best recent account of the Plan de San Diego is Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its



Notes to pages 137–139

215

Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). James A. Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego, 1904–1923 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992) remains an excellent source as well. The raids associated with the Plan de San Diego, coupled with Villa’s raid at Columbus and other cross-border hostilities during the period, not only created short-term tensions on the border, they also deepened ethnic hostilities and suspicions. See Oscar J. Martinez, Troublesome Border (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988). 61. F. W. Berkshire to Commissioner-General of Immigration, October 14, 1915, casefile 53108/71O, in INS, Records, reel 5. 62. E. P. Reynolds to Supervising Inspector, El Paso, August 10, 1915, 2, casefile 53108/71O, in INS, Records, reel 5; E. P. Reynolds to Supervising Inspector, El Paso, September 10, 1915, casefile 53108/71O, in INS, Records, reel 5. 63. Reynolds to Supervising Inspector, El Paso, September 10, 1915, 1; telegram, Funston to Adjutant General, Army, September 10, 1915, casefile 53108/71N, in INS, Records, reel 5. 64. Berkshire to Commissioner-General of Immigration, October 14, 1915; Reynolds to Supervising Inspector, El Paso, September 10, 1915, 1; Reynolds to Supervising Inspector, El Paso, March 4, 1916, 2, casefile 51941/7, in INS, Records, reel 1. 65. Reynolds to Supervising Inspector, El Paso, March 4, 1916, 5–6. 66. Immigration Service employees in Brownsville reported the continued use of illegal boats on the Rio Grande in 1920. U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1920 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1920), 440. 67. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 17–22. Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams, 42. 68. Coerver and Hall, Revolution on the Border, 127, 132. Louis Bloch estimated Mexican undocumented entry between 1911 and 1920 to be in the neighborhood of 100,000 individuals. Bloch, “Facts about Mexican Immigration,” 51. 69. U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration to the Secretary of Labor, 1913–1917. 70. Rejection rates for all immigrants in these years hovered around 1.5 percent. See U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1913–1917. 71. See U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration to the Secretary of Labor, 1913–1916. 72. Berkshire’s report is extracted in U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1913, 337. 73. U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1919, 710.



216

Notes to pages 139–142

74. Of course, these are not mutually exclusive categories. 75. U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1915, 265. 76. U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1916, 227. 77. Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 24. 78. Coerver and Hall, Revolution on the Border, 134; Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 27–32, 38. 79. Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams, 44.

Chapter Six 1. On the concept of structural dependence, see Wayne A. Cornelius, “Mexican Immigration to the United States: The Limits of Government Intervention,” Working Papers in U.S.-Mexican Studies 5 (1981), 6. 2. On immigration debates and restrictions during the 1920s, see John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 264–297; and Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Subjects and the Making of Modern America ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 21–55. 3. Quoted from U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the CommissionerGeneral of Immigration, 1921 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921), 16. 4. On the implementation of passport regulations and the role of the Immigration Service, see Darrell Hevenor Smith and H. Guy Herring, Bureau of Immigration: Its History, Activities, and Organization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1924), 30–31; and Clifford Alan Perkins, Border Patrol: With the U.S. Immigration Service on the Mexican Boundary, 1910–54 (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1978), 65, 73. Several hundred Europeans had been arrested after crossing the southern border in 1921. U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1921, 11; idem, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1922 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1922), 14. 5. U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1921, 12. 6. U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1923 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1923), 12–13. 7. Berkshire quoted in ibid., 18; San Antonio officer quoted in ibid., 17. 8. John R. Peavey, Echoes from the Rio Grande (Brownsville, TX: SpringmanKing, 1963), 121–135; U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the CommissionerGeneral of Immigration, 1923, 19. 9. California, State Board of Control, California and the Oriental: Japa-



Notes to pages 142–148

217

nese, Chinese and Hindus. Report of State Board of Control of California to Gov. Wm. D. Stephens. June 19, 1920 (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1970, first published 1920), 191–192. 10. Ibid., 175–176. 11. “Smugglers Are Caught on the Border,” newspaper clipping, n. p., n.d., in Los Angeles District Office, Segregated Chinese Case Files, 1893–1935, Box 223, Folder 5528/680, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85, National Archives and Records Administration, Pacific Region (Laguna Niguel) (hereafter INS, Records [Laguna Niguel]). 12. A. E. Burnett to Supervising Inspector, February 18, 1921, in INS, Records (Laguna Niguel). 13. “Statement of Paul Pappas,” January 18, 1921, in Los Angeles District Office, Segregated Chinese Case Files, 1893–1935, Box 226, Folder 5528/703, INS, Records (Laguna Niguel). 14. “Statement of M. L. Burtz . . . ,” January 8, 1921, in Los Angeles District Office, Segregated Chinese Case Files, 1893–1935, Box 225, Folder 5528/706, INS, Records (Laguna Niguel). 15. W. A. Brazie to Inspector in Charge, January 1, 1921, in Los Angeles District Office, Segregated Chinese Case Files, 1893–1935, Box 225, Folder 5528/704, INS, Records (Laguna Niguel). 16. “In re: Charles C. Barnhart,” September 25, 1923, in Los Angeles District Office, Segregated Chinese Case Files, 1893–1935, Box 236, Folder 5528, INS, Records (Laguna Niguel). The innocent tone to this account masks the fact that this was Barnhart’s third arrest for Chinese smuggling in three years. 17. For an account of the 1921 recession’s impact on Mexican immigrants, see Mark Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow: Mexican Immigrant Labor in the United States, 1900–1940 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1976), 49–55. 18. U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1920 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1920), 445. 19. U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1924 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1924), 16. 20. U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1920, 433. 21. Ibid., 433, 442. 22. Immigration officers reportedly destroyed the wooden boats of ferrymen who they apprehended. The ferry operators adapted their practices by building cheap, lightweight boats from willow. U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1924, 16. 23. U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1923, 16. 24. U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1924, 18. Processing immigrants was a slow affair on the border. If “you can pass one [immigrant] in 15 minutes you are doing splendidly,” F. W.



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Notes to pages 148–15 1

Berkshire testified in 1920. Berkshire testimony in House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Hearings on Mexican Border Security, 66th Cong., 2d sess., 1920, 21. 25. U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1927 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1927), 6, 10; idem, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1926, 20. The deportation totals apparently do not include those given “voluntary returns” to Mexico but only those Mexicans who were deported because of some aggravated circumstances, such as the commission of a crime in the United States. 26. Devra Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 48. 27. Constantine Panunzio, Immigration Crossroads (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 121–122. In 1929 the economist Paul S. Taylor cited estimates that undocumented Mexican immigration ran anywhere from 40 percent to 200 percent of Mexican legal immigration from the conclusion of World War I through 1929. Paul S. Taylor, “Mexican Labor in the United States: Migration Statistics,” in Mexican Labor in the United States (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970), 1:252. On the difficulties in determining undocumented immigration levels during this period, see Corwin, “Quien Sabe?” in Immigrants— and Immigrants: Perspectives on Mexican Labor Migration to the United States, ed. Arthur F. Corwin (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1978), 108–135. 28. For instance, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis told Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor that undocumented Mexican immigration resulted from the Wilson administration’s wartime exemptions program. Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 68. 29. The term “artificial barriers” comes from E. P. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 1798–1965 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 515. 30. U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1920, 6. 31. Ibid., 6, 454. On the impact of Prohibition on the border, see Perkins, Border Patrol, 83–88. 32. W. A. Brazie to Inspector in Charge, Los Angeles, January 23, 1920, in Los Angeles District Office, Segregated Chinese Case Files, 1893–1935, Box 221, Folder 5528/665, INS, Records (Laguna Niguel); U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1920, 452. 33. U.S. Department of Labor ,Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1920, 25. Officials in the Mexican Border District had, at least since 1914, detailed a portion of lower-grade officers to guard duties. The number of “mounted inspectors” never exceeded 60. Ibid., 24. 34. Ibid., 24. 35. Ibid., 433, 451, 440.



Notes to pages 152–154

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36. Ibid., 433–434. 37. Ibid., 442. 38. Ibid., 442. 39. U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1923, 20. 40. U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1920, 25. 41. House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Hearings to Provide for Division of Patrol Guard in the Bureau of Immigration, 66th Cong., 2d sess., 1919, 10. Elsewhere, geographically confused congressional representatives quizzed an Immigration Service employee about Rio Grande flows in Arizona. Idem, Hearings for More Officers in the Mexican Border Patrol, 66th Cong., 2d sess., February 13, 1920, 6. Conflicts between custom and immigration authorities over control of the Border Patrol continued even after the service had been created in the Bureau of Immigration. See House Committee on the Judiciary, Hearings to Establish a Border Patrol, 69th Cong., 1st sess., 1926. 42. House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Hearings for More Officers in the Mexican Border Patrol, February 12, 1920, 34–35. 43. Milton testimony in House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Hearings for More Officers in the Mexican Border Patrol, February 13, 1920, 3. 44. Webb testimony in House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Hearings for More Officers in the Mexican Border Patrol, February 13, 1920, 20. 45. U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1924, 18–19. 46. Quoted in Panunzio, Immigration Crossroads, 282. See also New York Times, June 19, 1927, 29. 47. John P. Jackson testimony in House Committee on the Judiciary, Hearings to Establish a Border Patrol, April 12, 1926, 17. 48. Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 59; Perkins, Border Patrol, 89–90. 49. Perkins, Border Patrol, 91; U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1927, 16; Wesley E. Stiles interview by Wesley C. Shaw, January 1986, transcript no. 756, 1, Institute of Oral History, University of Texas, El Paso. For the fullest accounts of the creation of the Border Patrol, see Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 64–71; Perkins, Border Patrol, 89–119; John Myers, The Border Wardens (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971); Alfredo Mirande, Gringo Justice (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), 10–114; and Juan Ramon Garcia, Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1980). 50. U.S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1926, 16–17. 51. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Immigration, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration, 1927, 19.



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Notes to pages 154–158

52. New York Times, June 19, 1927, 29. 53. G. C. Wilmoth, “The El Paso District,” in U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Immigration, Problems of the Immigration Service: Papers Presented at a Conference of Commissioners and District Directors of Immigration, Washington, D.C., January, 1929 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1929), 19–21. 54. Ibid., 20. 55. Ibid., 16. 56. David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 46. See also Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 50–55; and Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 254–258. 57. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 47–48, 50. 58. Ibid., 49–50. 59. Ibid., 47. 60. Camille Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900–1939 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 45–46; Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 49–51. In fact, as George Sánchez has noted, by the 1920s, many Mexican immigrants who entered the United States as sojourners had begun to imagine themselves becoming permanent residents. George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 124, 133. On efforts to Americanize Mexican immigrants, see Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 87–117. 61. Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 199–202. 62. Ibid., 59. 63. Stiles interview, 3, 5–6, 9. That is not to say that Mexican undocumented workers had always been ignored by Immigration Service patrols in the past. In his work as a patrol guard near Hidalgo in 1921 and 1922, Patrol Inspector John Peavey and his partner mostly detained Mexican workers. That, however, occurred within the context of the 1921 recession and efforts to discourage continued Mexican immigration. See Peavey, Echoes from the Rio Grande. Also, Stiles worked along a section of the border that had far less local demand for Mexican labor and therefore less undocumented Mexican migration. See Perkins, Border Patrol, 104. 64. Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 61–67, 207. 65. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 51–56; Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 205. 66. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 54; Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 204. 67. Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 207–13; Zolber, A Nation by Design, 257. 68. Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 213–214; Paul S. Taylor, “More Bars against Mexicans?” Survey Graphic, April 1930, 26–27. 69. Quoted in Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 214.



Notes to pages 159–165

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70. Officials instead explained the rise in apprehensions to the increased size of the Border Patrol force. James Hoffman Batten, “New Features of Mexican Immigration,” in Proceedings of the National Council on Social Work (1930), 489. 71. Paul S. Taylor, “Mexican Labor in the United States. Dimmit County, Winter Garden District, South Texas,” in U.S. Department of Labor, Victor S. Clark, Mexican Labor in the United States, 1:326–329. 72. Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 214; Batten, “New Features of Mexican Immigration,” 408; Arthur F. Corwin, “A History of Ad Hoc Exemptions,” in Immigrants—and Immigrants: Perspectives on Mexican Labor Migration to the United States, ed. Arthur F. Corwin (Westport, CT: Praeger), 146–148. In fact, immigration officials “rarely applied” the penalties of the Registry Act to Mexican undocumented workers and continued to use the far less time- and resourceintensive policy of offering Mexican undocumented workers “voluntary returns” to Mexico. Corwin, “A History of Ad Hoc Exemptions,” 148. 73. Stiles interview, 11. 74. Taylor, “More Bars against Mexicans?” 27.

Epilogue 1. El Paso Herald Post, April 26, 1941, 3. 2. The most recent full-length account of the repatriations of Mexicans in the 1930s is Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). See also Abraham Hoffman, Unwanted Mexicans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1929–1939 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974); Leobardo F. Estrada, F. Chris Garcia, Reynaldo Flores Macias, and Lionel Maldonado, “Chicanos in the United States: A History of Exploitation and Resistance,” Daedalus 110, no. 2 (1981), 103–131; and Ernesto Galarza, Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story (Charlotte, NC: McNally and Loftin, 1964). 3. Kitty Calavita, Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the I.N.S. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 19. 4. Ibid., 19–31, 42–45. Congress repeatedly renewed the program from 1954 through 1963 before allowing it to die in December 1964 under pressure from labor groups such as the United Farm Workers. 5. Ibid., 28. 6. Harold D. Frakes interview by Oscar J. Martinez, October 11, 1978, transcript no. 698, 7, Institute of Oral History (University of Texas at El Paso); Calavita, Inside the State, 33. 7. In retrospect, the program appears a bit naive in this regard. The idea that Mexicans would come, work for wages, and return unaltered by the experience, with no aspirations to either continue the practice indefinitely or perhaps consider a permanent move north, seems fantastic. 8. William H. Whalen, “Mexican Border Problems,” in U.S. Department of



222

Notes to pages 165–170

Labor, Bureau of Immigration, Problems of the Immigration Service: Papers Presented at a Conference of Commissioners and District Directors of Immigration, Washington, D.C., January, 1929 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1929), 17. 9. As I have tried to demonstrate in this work, periods of relative success in enforcing immigration laws on American land borders had more to do with external developments than with the activities of American border enforcement officials. Success on the Canadian border in the early 1900s could be attributed in large part to the advent of Canadian immigration restrictions. When Canadian authorities began making it more costly for Chinese immigrants to enter that country and began themselves screening out “undesirable immigrants,” they effectively brought to an end what U.S. officials deemed “the Canadian leak.” A decade later or so, events in Mexico and Europe more than the activities of American border officials curtailed Asian and European smuggling through Mexico. Similarly, the patterns of Mexican undocumented immigration that had risen slowly through the 1920s gave way not to more aggressive border enforcement efforts but to the reality of a devastated American economy after 1929. 10. Oscar J. Martinez, Troublesome Border (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988), 2. 11. George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 59–60, 133. The same phenomenon occurred after passage of the Immigration Control and Reform Act in 1987. See Jorge Durand, Douglass S. Massey, and Emilio A. Parrado, “The New Era of Mexican Migration to the United States,” Journal of American History 86 (September 1999): 518–537. 12. One of the best recent summaries of these multiple influences can be found in David G. Gutiérrez, “Migration, Emergent Ethnicity, and the ‘Third Space’: The Shifting Politics of Nationalism in Greater Mexico,” Journal of American History 86 (September 1999): 481–517. 13. Jorge A. Bustamante, “Mexican Immigration to the United States: De Facto Rules,” unpublished translation of paper presented at the “Mexico-U.S. Business Leaders” conference, Mexico City, February 19, 1984, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin; Galarza, Merchants of Labor. 14. The Remington illustration, with the caption “Dying of Thirst in the Desert,” appears in Julian Ralph, “The Chinese Leak,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 82 (March 1891), 522. Migration News, vol. 7, no. 6 (June 2000). See also John Annerino, Dead in Their Tracks: Crossing America’s Desert Borderlands (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999). 15. The Chicana poet and borderlands theorist Gloria Anzaldua relates the costs of being a borderland resident with Mexican roots in her work. See Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands: The New Mestiza = La Frontera (San Francisco: Spinsters, 1987), 4, 194. 16. Manuel Ceballos Ramirez and Lawrence Douglas Taylor Hansen, “Sín-



Notes to pages 171–175

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tesis histórica del poblamiento de la región fronteriza México-Estados Unidos,” Estudios Fronterizos 26 (September–December 1991): 9–37. Luis Alberto Urrea, Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (New York: Doubleday, 1993). 17. For an account of these initiatives that stressed their “symbolic importance,” see Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).



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index

Across the Wire, 175 African Americans, 28, 150, 168 Agua Prieta, Mexico, 106 Alberto Urrea, Luis, 175 Alien and Sedition Act, 16 Almshit, Selim, 114 Aloy, Wong, 115, 117 American Federation of Labor, 31, 39 American Party, 17 American Punitive Expedition, 137 anarchists, 71 Anderson, A. S., 86–87, 89 Anglo-Saxon myth, 19 Arizona, 13–14, 56–59, 61, 91, 100, 118–119, 126, 154, 156, 158 Arthur, Chester, 30, 44 assisted emigration, 21–22, 37, 43–44, 69, 72 At America’s Gates, 4

Border Patrol: early enforcement efforts of, 158, 162–166; establishment of, 5, 12, 146, 152–158 border ports of entry: establishment of, 67–92; exempted from immigrant inspection, 42–43, 75, 90 Boston, Massachusetts, 39, 41, 115 Bowers, William, 120 Box, John C., 162–164 Bracero program, 168–169 Braun, Marcus, 100, 104, 121 British Columbia, 38, 48–55 Brownsville, Texas, 91, 94, 106, 110– 111, 128, 138–140, 151 Buffalo, New York, 37, 53 Burlingame treaty, 30 Burtz, Luther, 150 Bustamante, Jorge, 9, 174 By the Sweat of Their Brow, 4

Baja California, Mexico, 14, 38, 55, 61, 63, 119 Barnhart, Charles, 150 Baseler, Marilyn, 16 Becoming Mexican American, 5 Beecher, Herbert, 51 Beirut, Lebanon, 104 Bemis, Edward W., 70 Berkshire, Frank, 123, 131, 135, 137, 141, 148, 150 Border. See Canadian border; Mexican border

Calavita, Kitty, 3–4, 70 Calexico, California, 137, 149–150, 153, 156 California: anti-Chinese sentiments in, 27–29; emigration of Chinese to, 25–27; smuggling and undocumented entry into, 56–57, 59, 61, 102, 106, 119, 125–126, 137, 148–150, 152–153, 156 Cameron, Charles, 120–121 Campo, California, 156 Canadian border: attractions for

smugglers of, 42, 49–50, 53–55, 62; smuggling and undocumented entry across, 37–54, 76–90 Canadian Pacific Railway, 48, 52, 84, 99 Cascade Mountains, 52–54 Castle Garden, 13, 20, 24, 39–40, 45 Central Pacific Railroad, 26 Chihuahua, Mexico, 13, 55, 167 Chinese: deportation of, 62–63; emigration to Mexico of, 99–100; exempt classes of, 30, 40, 97; initial immigration patterns of, 25–27; resistance to exclusion, 6, 40–41; smuggling and undocumented entry of, 37–38, 47–55, 80–92, 94, 98–100, 106–112, 115–121, 136, 149–150 Chinese amendments to, 38, 40, 56, 71; Exclusion Act: anti-Chinese sentiment and passage of, 25–30 Chinese Six Companies, 26, 98 Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, 56, 107, 109, 114–115, 117, 133, 167, 175 Cleveland, Grover, 63, 70, 73 Coast Guard, U.S., 155 Congress, U.S.: and border enforcement, 12, 39, 42–44, 46–47, 49, 55, 57–64, 66, 73–75, 81–82, 85–89, 99, 127, 146, 153–157, 163–165, 176; and immigration restrictions, 3, 16–18, 20, 23–24, 28, 30–33, 67–71, 162–164 Constitution, U.S., 17–18, 29, 67 Continental Crossroads, 8 contract labor: difficulty of enforcing ban on, 39, 42, 73; restrictions on immigration of, 32–34 convicts, restrictions on immigration of, 15–17, 20–21, 24–25, 35, 69, 72 Coon, Datus E., 62, 64–65 Cornelius, Wayne, 10 Cuba, 14, 26, 56 Curtis, Orson B., 64



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Customs Service, U.S.: responsibility for enforcement of Chinese Exclusion Act, 48, 73–74; role in enforcement of immigration laws on the borders, 39, 46, 80–81 Czolgosz, Leon, 71 Davis, James J., 145 Del Rio, Texas, 14, 56, 91, 106, 115, 162 deportation: of Chinese, 30, 57, 62– 63, 120; of Mexicans, 152, 163, 165; policy of, 16, 24, 39, 43, 46–47 deterrence, border enforcement as a means of, 88, 121, 128, 134, 155–157, 165, 173, 176 Detroit, Michigan, 46, 64, 81, 159 Detroit Board of Poor Commissioners, 45 Díaz, Porfirio, 13, 55, 125 Dillingham Commission, 161 Douglas, Arizona Territory, 154 Eagle Pass, Texas, 14, 91, 106, 110, 114, 116, 126, 128, 137–138, 142 Edinburgh, Texas, 166 Ellis Island, 45, 72, 75, 87, 95, 104, 106, 115, 130 El Paso, Texas: port of entry inspections at, 90–91, 102–103, 105–106, 128, 134, 148, 151, 160, 167; railroad links through, 13–14, 126; as a site of Mexican immigration, 126–127, 131–135; undocumented entry and smuggling through, 56, 60–62, 93, 100, 106–109, 113–120, 132–133, 154 English immigrants, 11, 23, 43, 149 Ensenada, Mexico, 57–59, 64, 106 Fairchild, C. S., 46 Ferries, 47, 64, 119, 138–140, 151, 171–172 Fitzgerald, Keith, 4

Foran Act: enforcement of, 39, 42, 73; passage of, 32–34 Foreign Miner’s Tax, 27 Foster, Charles, 73 Galarza, Ernesto, 174 Gentlemen’s Agreement, 71, 102–103, 163 Great Britain, 22–23, 32, 44, 63, 75, 97 Great Depression, 146, 166, 170 Greeks: acting as smugglers, 51, 149; entering legally through Mexico, 97; smuggling and undocumented entry of, 2, 11, 38, 94, 105, 107, 109– 110, 118, 148, 159–160 Guaymas, Mexico, 57–59, 100, 106 Gutiérrez, David, 161, 173 Halifax, Nova Scotia, 44–45, 78 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 37, 60 Harrison, Benjamin, 13–14 Hasekawa, Ging, 117 head tax: border crossers exempted from, 43, 90, 127; instituted, 24; raised, 85, 89, 142; as source of immigration enforcement funding, 20, 75; viewed as a brake on immigration, 71 Henderson v. Mayor of the City of New York, 18 Higham, John, 7, 34, 69 House Industrial Commission, 72, 85 Hoyt, Charles, 44 Hudspeth, Claude, 157 Immigration, Bureau of: corruption in, 115–116; creation of, 68; establishment of border controls by, 74–75, 80–92; responsibility for Chinese inspection, 74 Immigration Act (1875), 24 Immigration Act (1882), 20, 23–25, 35, 38–39, 42



Immigration Act (1891), 66, 68–69, 73 Immigration Act (1903), 70, 84–85, 90, 127–128, 146 Immigration Act (1917), 142–143, 150 Immigration Act (1921), 147 Immigration Act (1924), 147, 151, 157, 162, 164 Imperial Valley, California, 149–150, 163 Impossible Subjects, 5 interpreters, 115–117, 153 Irish: as assisted emigrants, 22; entry via Canada, 2, 7, 42–44; as targets of nativists, 13, 17, 20 Italians: acting as smugglers, 51, 149; entry through Canada, 82; entry through Mexico, 105; regarded as racially distinct, 7; as targets of nativists, 13, 20, 32–33; undocumented entry by, 11, 45, 96, 105, 148, 159 Japanese: acting as smugglers, 107, 115, 119, 149; entering legally through Mexico, 94–97, 101–103; and the Gentlemen’s Agreement, 71, 101; smuggling and undocumented entry of, 98, 103, 106–107, 112–114, 117, 132, 148 Jefferson, Thomas, 16 Jerome, Lovell, 56 Jewish immigrants, 82, 105 Johnson, E. H., 13, 20 Kate, Tom, 115 Kazen, Abraham, 116 Kazen, Anton, 116 Kearney, Dennis, 28 Khoury, Khalil, 117 Knights of Labor, 31–32, 73 Labor bureaus, 31–32, 126 Labor unions, 25, 28, 30–34

Index

241

Lawton, Fred, 139 Lebanese: acting as smugglers, 104, 107, 116; entering legally through Mexico, 94, 96, 98, 103, 106, 112; smuggling and undocumented entry of, 104, 107, 109, 113–114, 116, 118, 159. See also Syrians Lee, Erika, 4–7 Legacy of Conquest, vi, 8 Lemon, Alexander, 114 Limerick, Patricia Nelson, 8 literacy test: application of, 151, 159– 160, 165; campaign for, 68–71, 89; waived during World War I, 142– 143, 150 Lockport, New York, 53 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 70 Los Angeles, California, 149, 153, 161 Los Ebanos, Texas, 139 Lott, Andrew, 150 Lower Rio Grande Valley, 132, 135– 140, 148, 151, 166, 172 Magdalena, Mexico, 100 Maine, 42, 82 Manzanillo, Mexico, 106 Marseilles, France, 104 Martinez, Oscar, ix, 9, 172 Massachusetts, 16–17, 21, 39, 44 Massachusetts State Board of Lunacy and Charity, 44 Matamoros, Mexico, 110–111 Mattar, Selim, 116–117 Mazatlan, Mexico, 57–58, 106, 148 McWilliams, Carey, 4, 175–176 Medical inspections: attempts by immigrants to evade, 79, 83, 104–105, 113–114; as basis for exclusion of immigrants, 105; on the borders, 5, 104–105, 113 Mexicali, Mexico, 106, 149–150 Mexican Americans, 139, 165, 168, 175 Mexican border: attractions for smug-



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glers of, 38, 55, 59–60, 62, 95–98, 102–103; smuggling and undocumented entry across, 55–66, 93– 140, 145–166 Mexican Coal and Coke Company, 102 Mexican Revolution, 93–94, 121, 124, 135–140, 143–144 Mexicans: acting as smugglers, 107, 109, 120, 150; characterized as “birds of passage,” 146–148; debates over restrictions on, 160–164; as migratory workers, 125–126, 130, 141, 143, 161; as refugees from revolutionary violence, 135–142; smuggling and undocumented entry of, 132–142, 150–166, 169–170, 173–176 Mexico City, 13, 91, 104, 107, 112, 114 Michigan, 44, 53, 82 militarization of the Mexican border, 64–65, 135–140, 143, 157, 168 Miller, John, 28 Milton, Jeff, 120, 156 Mink, Gwendolyn, 31 Monterey and Mexican Gulf Road, 14, 56 Montreal, Canada, 37, 84, 86, 99 Morga, Jose, 167–168 Naco, Mexico, 91, 106 National Origins Act. See Immigration Act (1924) nativism, 7, 15, 18, 27, 69 Newbern, 57–58, 61 “new immigrants,” 19, 33, 67, 70 New Mexico, 13, 120, 126, 137 New York City, 24, 31–32, 45 New York State, 16–18, 21–23, 37, 41– 44, 53, 79, 113 New York State Board of Charities, 23, 44, 70 Ngai, Mae, 5–7 Niagara Falls, New York, 81

Nogales, Arizona Territory, 56, 58, 62, 91, 106, 108, 126, 128, 132, 138, 151 North American Free Trade Agreement, 175 North from Mexico, 4 Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, 107, 118, 165 Olympic Peninsula, 50 “Operation Gatekeeper,” 176 “Operation Hold-the-Line,” 176 opium smuggling, 50–51 Our Country, 19 Pappas, Paul, 149 passport regulations, 6, 103, 114, 147, 153, 167, 169 Pattison, George, 61 paupers: restrictions on immigration of, 16–17, 20–25, 33–35, 70–71, 82, 101, 124, 129–133, 141–142; undocumented entry of, 37–39, 42–47 Peavey, John, 148 Perkins, Clifford, 115 Piedras Negras, Mexico, 110 Pilafan, Mike, 149 Port Huron, Michigan, 53 Portland, Oregon, 50 Portland, Maine, 44 Port Townsend, Washington territory, 50–51 Powderly, Terence, 73, 81 Prohibition, 153 Proposition, 187, 175 prostitutes, restrictions on immigration of, 18, 70–71, 129 Pruett, L., 117 Puget Sound, 37, 49–51 Quebec, Canada, 22, 37, 47, 78 race, and border enforcement, 35, 63–65, 111–112, 174–175; and immi-



gration restrictions, 5, 7, 15, 19–20, 25, 27–31, 33, 35, 71, 164 Ralph, Julian, 60 refugees, 15–16, 135–142 Registry Act, 165 Reisler, Mark, 4, 164 Remington, Frederic, 59–60, 174 Reynolds, E. P., 139–140 Rio Grande River, 13, 93, 106, 111, 118, 138–139, 171 Robb, Jay, 149 Roosevelt, Theodore, 71, 103 Russian immigrants, 97, 159 St. John’s, Newfoundland, 78 Salina Cruz, Mexico, 106 Salyer, Lucy, 6, 49 Sam, Charlie, 115 Sánchez, George, 2, 5–6, 173 San Diego, California, 57–64, 106, 119–120, 156, 176 San Francisco, California, 25–28, 40–41, 49–52, 57–58, 62, 106–107, 149–150 San Juan Island, Washington territory, 50 San Pedro harbor, California, 119 Sargent, Frank P., 67, 86, 88–89, 103, 126–127, 139, 155 Schell, H. H., 62 Scott Act, 41 Seattle, Washington territory, 49–50, 54 September 11, 2001, 176 Seraphic, A. A., 109–114, 116 Simaan, Michael, 116 Sonora, Mexico, 14, 38, 55, 59, 61, 100, 106, 149, 156 Spencer, Herbert, 19 Spickard, Paul, 7 State, Department of, U.S., 18, 21, 133, 162, 164–165 steamship companies, 27, 43–45, 59,

Index

243

72, 74, 76–79, 83–86, 89, 99, 105, 136 Stiles, Wesley E., 162–163, 166 Stone, Frank, 133 Strangers in the Land, 7 Stratton, William, 115 Strong, Josiah, 19 Stump, Herman, 63, 73, 77 Supreme Court, U.S., 17–18, 20, 67 Syrians: acting as smugglers, 106, 114, 116; entering legally through Mexico, 82, 97, 103–105; smuggling and undocumented entry of, 84, 110, 163. See also Lebanese Tacoma, Washington territory, 37, 49 Taft, Howard, 136 Tampico, Mexico, 56, 147 Taylor, Paul, 165 Taylor, Richard, 115 Taylor Hansen, Lawrence Douglas, 56 technology, and border enforcement, 11, 61, 76, 94, 171 Texas: establishment of inspections on border of, 90–91; smuggling and undocumented entry into, 14, 56, 60–62, 100, 102–119, 125–129, 131–144, 148, 151, 154, 157, 159–160, 162–163, 165–172, 176 Texas Rangers, 139, 157 Tillman, A. C., 46 Tombstone, Arizona territory, 58



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imaginary lines

Toronto, Canada, 53 Truett, Samuel, 8 Tucson, Arizona territory, 56, 60, 118–119 Vancouver Island, British Columbia, 49–50, 53 Van Voorhis, John, 22, 24, 43 Vera Cruz, Mexico, 104 Vermont, 42, 45 Victoria, British Columbia, 49–52 Villa, Pancho, 136 Washington territory, 37, 48–55 Watchorn, Robert, 82–90, 155 Webb, George, 156 Weber, Devra, 152 Welty, Benjamin, 155–156 Whalen, William, 167, 170, 172 Williams, Albert, 150 Williams, J. E., 57 Wilmoth, G. C., 159 Wilson, William B., 142–143 Wilson, Woodrow, 136–137 Wixon, I. F., 163 World War I, 143, 168–169 World War II, 168–169 Wrightington, S. C., 44 Young, Elliott, 8 Yuma, Arizona territory, 59 Zolberg, Aristide, 6